Holocaust Remembrance Day is on January 27th every year. January 27th was the day of liberation of the largest Nazi concentration camp, called Auschwitz. On this day, we honor the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust that were taken from their homes into concentration camps and ghettos then persecuted by German soldiers during World War ll. During this time period, synagogues were burned and destroyed, over 7,000 Jewish businesses were boycotted and vandalized, and laws that were passed took away all Jewish rights. 8th graders at Rosemont Middle School are learning about these tragic events in their English classes as they are preparing to read The Diary of Anne Frank. “Typically, in literature, when you’re preparing to read a certain piece, you do background work on it and you study what’s going on so that you know what the author was trying to communicate,” Ms. Castano, an 8th grade English teacher, noted.
We asked Ms. Castano for her view of why it’s so important to learn about and remember these events. She said, “Well, unfortunately, these kinds of events make a big impact in society, not just in German society and the people that dealt with it, but in our society today… we have to learn from our mistakes and if we just ignore them, then we don’t have the opportunity to learn from them.” Rosemont has had Holocaust survivors such as Joseph Alexander, Lea Radziner, David Lenga, Harry Davids, and Herb Murez tell their stories to students. By listening to holocaust survivors in films, real life, and reading The Diary of Anne Frank, students will learn the power of standing up, and speaking out against injustice in the world.
The Holocaust was an awful war crime committed by Nazi leaders such as Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Reinhard Heydrich. At that time, it was known as the “Final Solution”. The Nazis did the most awful things to the Jews that they persecuted. In many camps, the women, children, and anyone who could not work, were almost immediately executed in mass ovens. The rest of the men were put to work laboring for the Germans and being test subjects for dreadful experiments. In the end, we can never forget about the pain and suffering that Jews went through during those dark times.