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Dear 7th graders at Rossville Jr. High
Hi. My name is Mrs. Diana Newman. I work in a middle school
in
Connecticut. I am also going to school for my PhD in special
education. For one of my courses, I have to investigate classroom
websites. I happened upon your teacher's website tonight.
I would like to comment on your very thorough Holocaust projects.
As I
teacher I think that they were done very well. However, I would
like to
also tell you how very touched I was reading your websites- you see, my
husband's parents are survivors of the Holocaust. The information
that
you researched and wrote about is very, very true.
My husband's parents were teenagers when they were brought to Auschwitz
(they did not know each other at the time). My mother-in-law was
sixteen when she was separated from her mother when they arrived in the
night at Auschwitz. Her last memory of her mother was seeing her
taken
away in a blaze of floodlights. She never saw her again. Her baby
sister had died in the ghetto of disease. When they lived in the ghetto,
if a family was lucky they got one skinny chicken, some old rotten
potatoes and one loaf of bread to last for the WHOLE week. But many
weeks they didn't even get the chicken. In the camp, my
mother-in-law
was examined by Dr. Mengele but fortunately was not "operated"
on in an
evil experiment because the war soon ended. Instead, a young Nazi
soldier took pity on her and snuck her some medicine (she had
tuberculosis). When the American soldiers liberated the people at
Auschwitz, my father-in-law was 20 years old and weighed 60 lbs.
It is very moving to hear survivors sing "God Bless America"
whenever
they have a meeting of their association-- over fifty years later, they
still cry and bless American soldiers for saving them.
As a child, my husband did not have ANY grandparents and only one uncle
(everyone else was exterminated in the camps).
More and more of the survivors of the horror of the Holocaust are dying
now of old age. Soon none of them will be alive. Their
biggest fear of
dying is that no one will remember what happened after they are all
gone. They are afraid that no one will remember all those who died
and
that these atrocities could happen again to anyone.
I am so pleased to have been able to see your work on the internet.
I
think that projects such as yours will help future generations to work
for peace. Thank you for sharing your work.
Mrs. Diana Newman
chatbox18@juno.com |
