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04/12/2018 12:01 AMWe recently vacationed in Saint Petersburg, Florida where our younger son and his wife reside. We try to visit our dear friend Lilly Salcman when we’re down there. We originally met Lilly and her husband Arthur more than 20 years ago when they lived in Old Saybrook. After Arthur died, Lilly retired full-time to their condo in Saint Pete Beach.
We visited on a picture-perfect Florida afternoon and sat out on her deck overlooking an active scene. It was spring break and loud noise amplified from the hotel pool next to Lilly’s building, along with kids revving motorbikes directly under us.
Lilly was oblivious to what I found annoying. Looking around she smiled and commented, “When you have nothing but striped pajamas, it’s hard to believe I have this to look out at every day.”
Her words gave me the chills. They also gave me tremendous hope for the resilience of the human spirit.
Lilly is an Auschwitz survivor. She is 95 years old. There are few survivors left to directly tell their stories. Lilly continues to tell hers, to school children in New York City where her daughter lives. She shows us the piles of letters she’s received from students thanking her for sharing her story, telling her how sorry they are for all she’s been through, and what an inspiration she is.
Today (Thursday, April 12) is Yom Hashoah—translated from Hebrew as “Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day.” It commemorates the approximately six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust 73 years ago at the hands of Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and also commemorates the Jewish resistance at that time.
I worry as our Baby Boomer generation—including the children of survivors—is also aging, will children continue to learn about this horrific time in our not-so-distant past? Will they continue to learn not to make the mistakes that hate and bigotry breed?
I spoke about this subject with Marji Lipshez-Shapiro of Guilford, senior associate director for the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) Connecticut regional office. She knows firsthand that over the past year and a half there has been a nationwide up tick in reported anti-Semitic hate crimes, as well as public denial of the Holocaust, and Connecticut is not immune.
In her almost 28 years at the ADL, Lipshez-Shapiro created Names Can Really Hurt Us, an anti-bias and anti-bullying education program that’s affected more that 150,000 high school students statewide.
She also coordinates (in Connecticut) the national Echoes & Reflections Holocaust education program for middle- and high school students, founded in 2005, personally training more than 1,000 educators. A joint initiative of the ADL, USC Shoah Foundation, and Yad Vashem-The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, the program is described as “The premier source for Holocaust educational materials and dynamic content, empowering teachers and students with the insight needed to question the past and the foresight to impact the future.”
“Holocaust education isn’t mandated in Connecticut [as in some states], but right now there’s a strong mandate to teach Holocaust and genocide education before the state legislature,” Lipshez-Shapiro points out. “There are some teachers who teach it amazingly well and many who do not. It’s a very complicated, challenging topic to teach.”
Lipshez-Shapiro acknowledges that nothing can replace a student’s ability to directly speak to a Holocaust survivor. She notes that Branford’s Selma Engel, now in her mid-90s, and her late husband Chaim, spent many years offering programs in all the shoreline schools and beyond, telling their incredible story of being known worldwide as the only Dutch survivors of the concentration camp Sobibor.
Lipshez-Shapiro also stresses that although direct voices will never be replaced, many strategies, programs, and initiatives are continually being developed by all the major Holocaust education organizations, and that what’s unique about Echoes & Reflections is that students do get to meet survivors through more than 50 videotaped testimonials that teachers pair with particular lessons.
Also unique, she says, is that “we teach from a perspective of what’s called ‘cultural and spiritual resistance.’ Too often the sadness [and] despair is too overwhelming. When we teach about what people did to resist oppression, it’s very inspiring and the students learn about fighting adversity.”
Lipshez-Shapiro says Echoes & Reflections has received more positive feedback than anything she’s ever done in her life, as shown through hundreds of letters and evaluations from teachers.
Shelley Capozzi, the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, helps implement the program at Polson Middle School in Madison where she’s a para-educator.
“As educators, we have a vital responsibility to ensure that the current generation of students receive the highest caliber of Holocaust education,” Capozzi says. “Echoes & Reflections is an exemplary leader in this field, succeeding in enlightening students—as well as educators—about all aspects of the Holocaust, one of humanity’s darkest periods.”
In 2010 Lipshez-Shapiro spoke about this subject in Jerusalem at an international conference for educators of the Holocaust at Yad Veshem and says it was one of the major highlights of her career.
“In order to fight hate, we need to respect other people and not fear difference, to [teach students] to not accept the stereotypes or bigotry they hear about other groups,” she says. “If that had happened in Germany, we wouldn’t have had the Holocaust. People are too ready to accept negative information about other groups.”
Lipshez-Shapiro notes that the entire Echoes & Reflections program, including lesson plans, is available free, at echoesandreflections.org.
She is looking for more teachers—public, private, or independent—to attend this year’s information session, which is sponsored every fall at Quinnipiac University’s School of Education in North Haven (date TBD). For more information and/or to be on the list to receive this year’s flier, email mshapiro@adl.org.
On Monday, April 16 at 7 p.m., the film Big Sonya, described as a “laugh-out-loud funny portrait of the power of love to triumph over bigotry” told through the eyes of 91-year-old Sonia Warshawski, a great grandmother, business woman, and Holocaust survivor, will be screened at Madison Arts Cinema, downtown Madison. There will be a post-film talkback with Lipshez-Shapiro. Tickets ($10) are available at the door or in advance at www.jccnh.org.
Amy J. Barry is a Baby Boomer, who lives in Stony Creek with her husband and assorted pets. She writes theater reviews for Shore Publishing newspapers and is an expressive arts educator. Contact her at amy.j.barry@snet.net or www.aimwrite-ct.net.