They’re turning Yom Hashoah into a teaching moment at the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center in Dania Beach.
Also known as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the museum brought a dozen Holocaust survivors together with 130 students from Christa McAuliffe Middle School in Boynton Beach.
“We need to get this message across to everyone about what happened during World War II and the Holocaust. Unfortunately, there are still people who question whether it really happened,” said Alex Metzger, one of the survivors who volunteered to tell his story and answer questions from the kids.
Meeting people who actually experienced the Shoah is vastly different from reading about it in a textbook.
“Reading it from a book, you’re not getting emotions, you’re not understanding it as much as you would from a real person,” said 8th grader Mael Dieudonne.
“I think it really affects the class and how we’re learning because when you bring the real people, and they talk about their experiences, it affects how we learn,” added classmate Emy Genest.
The students talked to an interactive hologram, then they met the actual person on the screen, Stella Sonnenschein. She was smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto when she was seven years old, and a series of Christian families hid her from the Nazis until the war was over.
“How people were being killed, tortured, right in front of my eyes, so I saw what can happen when there is a hate in the air,” Sonnenschein said.
Not only did the kids get to interact face-to-face with survivors, but they also saw part of the machinery of the Holocaust. The museum has an actual railroad car which transported Jews to the death camps, and there is also a real U.S. Army Sherman tank, which was part of the division which liberated the Dachau concentration camp, on display.
Like all survivors, Alex Metzger has an epic story. He was hidden as a child by a Catholic family in Belgium. One of his earliest memories is liberation day, when the allied forces drove the German army out of the country.
“Some Canadian and American soldiers were coming down the street handing out cigarettes and chocolates, I was too young to smoke so I took the chocolate bars,” Metzger said with a laugh.
Now he’s deeply worried about the rising antisemitism he sees on both sides of the political spectrum.
“People say history tends to repeat itself, if you don’t like what happened the first time around and you see the same signals now, you need to do something about it to stop it from happening again.”
That’s exactly what Tuesday’s event was all about.
“We have to really teach the young people to love and to tolerate and to accept other nations and other people,” Sonnenschein said.