43
Fifth-grade class learns somber lesson
By Denise Dick
YOUNGSTOWN
Julie Clark, a fifth-grade teacher at Williamson Elementary School, tears up as she talks to her students about the Holocaust.
“I just want all of us to be kind to one another,” Clark said.
Elior and Eran Liss from the Youngstown Area Jewish Federation spoke to Clark’s class Thursday as part of the observance of Holocaust Remembrance Day, also known as Yom Hashoah. Each of the Lisses had a grandparent who survived the tragedy.
Holocaust Remembrance Day, begun in 1953, honors the 6 million Jews and 5 million others killed by the Nazis leading up to and throughout World War II.
Release of white and yellow balloons, symbolizing remembrance and peace, respectively, followed the discussion.
Elior explained that in Israel, sirens sound each Remembrance Day, signaling the start of two minutes of silence to remember the dead and honor the survivors.
They showed the students a video of a busy highway in Israel where, at the siren’s blare, cars stopped and people got out to observe the solemn occasion.
Clark led the students in two minutes of silence before the balloon release.
Of the 6 million Jews who were killed, 1.5 million were children, from infants to 15 years, Eran said.
In Clark’s class, students learned about some of those children.
Mariah Santisteuan, 10, learned about Emmanuel Alper, a 15-year-old boy murdered by the Nazis. Savaughn Moore, 11, learned about a 10-year-old girl who also was killed.
Pictures and short biographies of some of the murdered children decorate a wall outside of Clark’s classroom.
“They died for no reason,” Savaughn said.
“They died just because they were Jewish,” Mariah added.
The Lisses showed the students another video, this one of the late Bill Vegh. Vegh, who died in 2009, survived the Holocaust and settled in Youngstown where he married and raised a family.
Vegh said for years he wouldn’t talk about the ordeal, preferring to try to forget. When he heard people in prominent positions argue that the Holocaust never happened, however, his silence ended.
For years, Vegh talked about his experience to school and community groups.
“If we forget, it could happen again,” he said in the video.
Eran said to him, that sentence packs power.
He, Elior and others whose older loved ones lived through the atrocities must educate younger people.
“The survivors are old, and they’re dying,” Eran said. “Our generation — the third generation — it’s our job to be so, so educated about [the Holocaust] so we can educate the next generation.”