Students in the Cleveland Heights High School Lessons of the Holocaust class and members of the Minority Student Achievement Network (MSAN) joined forces for a sixth time this school year when 41 students and four adults visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC on April 22-23.
The visit included a session with a Holocaust survivor, a tour of the museum and a debrief discussion after the museum tour. Before the tour, students also visited the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial and other memorials on the mall.
Mark Sack teaches the Lessons of the Holocaust class, a social studies elective. He says the experience was important in many ways.
“One of the most powerful exhibits for the students was the pile of 4,000 shoes that had belonged to real people - teens like them, infants and elderly men and women,” said Mr. Sack. “The smell and sight of those shoes helped the students understand the magnitude of the Holocaust.”
The museum visit also helped students connect the events of the Holocaust to their lives today.
“That image of the shoes and the cattle car that transported victims to their deaths helped students understand that there is a slippery slope from prejudice and hate to genocide. We want the students to know that they can make a difference by acting as an upstander when they see injustice.”
After the museum tour, students wrote about what they learned and described a challenge that they face.
My personal challenge is to be more of an up stander, and not a bystander, when I see bullying.
I learned that freedom should not be taken for granted. For me, a challenge in my life is to step up and speak up when I see discrimination.
A big challenge for me is that I feel like I am not doing enough to make a difference in the world
The museum tour showed me how many people, not just Jews, were impacted by the Holocaust. It was very emotional for me.
A lesson that I learned today is that discrimination is very present in today’s society. I believe that it can only be stopped with love. If we continue to hate, we will not get anywhere.
The other adults who accompanied the students were: Nathan Williams, African American Studies, Shawn Washington, AVID and Kennethian Brown, English.
The group boarded a tour bus at 11:30 p.m. on April 22 and returned just before midnight on April 23.
The trip was funded by the Holocaust Education Fund of the Heights High Alumni Foundation and the Anti-Defamation League. Meals were provided by Corky and Lenny’s Restaurant and Executive Caterers at Landerhaven.