Holocaust program keeping stories alive
Students to 'remake' lives of four survivors as part of May 7 event
BY SETH MANDEL
Staff Writer

MONROE - For many Holocaust survivors, liberation from Nazi concentration camps was only the beginning of their stories of survival, and the survival of their stories.

That will be the theme of the Henry Ricklis Holocaust Memorial Committee's annual program in observance of Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Remembrance Day.

While the official Holocaust Remembrance Day was Tuesday, the program is scheduled for May 7 due to the availability of the performing arts center at Monroe Township High School.

Program director Nina Wolff said the lighting of yahrzeit candles will take place at 1 p.m., followed at 1:30 by the program, called "Beyond the Holocaust: The Remaking of Lives."

Several local and religious officials will speak, after which a choir will perform songs and two menorahs will be lit.

The candles of one menorah will be lit by Holocaust survivors, while the second menorah will be lit by second-generation survivors, or children of survivors, and one candle will be lit in honor of Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who passed away last year.

"That will be very emotional and quite lovely," Wolff said.

At that point, Wolff will introduce the main presentation, which will center around the future of the survivors, their families and their stories.

"This year, we decided that we should begin to look forward and into the next generation," Wolff said, noting the importance of the younger generation's connection with Holocaust survivors and their role in the continued remembrance of the atrocities of the Holocaust and the lessons that must be learned.

The day's focus will be Monroe Township's participation in the Adopt-a-Survivor program. The program pairs a survivor with a student in order to ensure the survivor's story will be accurately and passionately represented when the survivor is no longer able to tell it.

Four area middle school students have worked with four local survivors for the presentation.

"They have agreed to adopt a survivor, and in doing so, they really bond with the survivor, they get to know their story very well. They interview them, spend time with them socially, things like that," Wolff said.

These students will tell their survivors' stories at the program, though each has made an even more significant promise.

"These students have made a commitment, that in 2045, which is the hundredth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, they will find a public forum and tell their survivor's story," Wolff said. "So this is really an incredible group of young people, and it's an incredible way to keep these stories of these survivors going forward."

The four survivors, all of whom live in Monroe, have filled out a survey about their experiences during the Holocaust, and their post-war lives.

"And from that, we met with them, and I made up a script, and merged all four into one big script, and their students are going to tell their stories as if they were the survivors," Wolff said.

After last year's program, which included a 60-year retrospective, Wolff felt it was time to begin going forward, since the survivors' generation must soon pass the torch of Holocaust education and awareness.

"The survivors will be gone, but other people need to tell their stories," Wolff said.

Also during the presentation, which will be conversational as opposed to a lecture, two second-generation survivors will talk about their lives growing up as children of survivors.

Wolff said many of the survivors she has come in contact with have kept their stories from their children for many years.

"They didn't want to burden them. They didn't want them to feel sorry for them," Wolff said. "But as they've begun to open up, now that they're getting more toward the end of their life, their children are beginning to open up as well. And it's really the natural progression of keeping them alive."

There will also be a display of art and poetry created by students from East Brunswick's Hammarskjold Middle School. Two teachers at the school, Stephanie Margolis and Susan Pomerantz, teach a broad curriculum of Holocaust education, and have agreed to present some of their students' reactionary art and poetry, Wolff said.

Another display will feature artwork created by children of survivors of the Darfur conflict, an intensely violent military struggle within the western region of Sudan that has been characterized as both ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Holocaust survivors can identify with such persecution, Wolff said, and the Ricklis organization seeks to promote peace and understanding, with the hope that the world will one day be rid of such atrocities.

"The Ricklis mission statement is not just to teach about the Holocaust, but to prevent future genocide and to teach tolerance," Wolff said, adding that Holocaust survivors share the same goal.

"They all talk to this issue, that it can't happen again and we can't sit by and let it happen again, and that children today really have to learn tolerance," she said.

Admission to the May 7 program is free. The event officially begins at 1:30 p.m.