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Students Honor Holocaust Remembrance Day

April 30, 2014 by Isabella L (’14) (Students)

In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 27, JPDS-NC students participated in a Holocaust Commemoration Ceremony this week. On Thursday, April 24, we remembered the survivors of the Holocaust. Those who survived. And those who defied, risking their own lives for others. Third to sixth graders commemorated this by watching a video about the 109-year-old Holocaust survivor, Alice Herz-Sommer . Alice was the oldest Holocaust survivor until she died on February 23, 2014, a week before her movie won the Academy Award. The movie was called the “Lady in Number Six” and was produced by Nick Reed. When Sommer was 39, she was arrested and put in a concentration camp with her son, Rafi. From his mother’s optimism, he too survived the camps.  Sommer loved music and it was a dream to her. “Music is God,” Sommer said. 

We also watched a film about Sir Nicholas Winton who led the expedition to save 669 kids who would have gone to concentration camps and been killed. Those kids were mostly from German-occupied Czechoslovakia. Winton, a British humanitarian, was in Europe when he saw Jewish kids being taken and put into camps. Outraged, Winton then led the expedition which was later called the Czech Kindertransport. Winton helped to get them to homes in England or other safe places.

At the end of the assembly, as the classes were walking out, we got to pass small memorials that the 6th graders had made for Holocaust Commemoration. Each 6th grader did something different.  A lot of them included 6 candles, symbolizing the 6 million Jews that died in the Holocaust.