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Lessons from Holocaust
Boardman students hear stories from witness to ‘walking dead’
BOARDMAN
Speaking to a crowd of high school students, Leon Bass described a day when he was about their age and helped liberate the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1945 Germany.
“I was totally unprepared, and I never ever forgot what I saw,” Bass said. He was 19 at the time.
What he saw was the “walking dead” — humans who had been beaten, starved and tortured.
Bass spoke to Boardman High School students Monday morning for the school’s observance of Diversity Day. Sam Nahem, who won an Emmy award for his 2008 documentary “Beyond the Fence: Memories of Buchenwald,” which featured Bass’ story, also spoke to students.
English teacher Vincetta Russo-Haber organized the event for Diversity Day, which is combined with “Mix It Up,” a national initiative to encourage students to sit with someone new in the cafeteria for just one day. Boardman High School has participated in “Mix It Up” for four years.
Student council members led Monday’s “Mix It Up.”
“We have so many people in our school that it’s easy for people to stay in their groups,” said Luis Salomon, student council president. “I hope we get more mingling.”
Russo-Haber said she invited Bass and Nahem to speak because the Holocaust showed the extreme of what happens when people are not diverse and stay within one group.
“We fear what we don’t know,” said Russo-Haber. “When we don’t know, we set up stereotypes and alienate people, and that’s what happened a lot to the Jews during World War II.”
Nahem told students that the Holocaust didn’t happen overnight, but was a gradual process of demeaning specific groups of people and creating laws that excluded them from society.
“You don’t have to be best friends, but none of us have a right to persecute, oppress or pick on anyone else,” Nahem said.
Bass, who is black, said when he first joined the Army, he experienced institutional racism within his own country as he served in a segregated unit.
He added that he became angry at defending a country that didn’t think he was “good enough.” Then his unit was sent to Buchenwald.
“I was not the same,” he said. “I realized that all pain and suffering could not be relegated to me.”