Trip to Holocaust Museum an Eye-Opener

A springtime trip became an intense journey into another time and place for 10 Los Alamitos High School students taking part in the National Youth Leadership Mission at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

For four days, the leaders of Griffins With a Mission, a group dedicated to promoting tolerance on campus and beyond, heard from other students and listened to stories from survivors of the Holocaust and other speakers at the gathering sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League.

John Lewis, a Georgia congressman who marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the height of the civil-rights movement and became a close friend, spoke to the students about prejudice and persecution in America.

For Ben Schechter, 17, researching his family’s fate in Poland during World War II was an intense experience that prompted him to take a closer look at something that had not interested him much before.

Schechter, who is Jewish, took the first step in constructing a family tree and also finding out which of his relatives perished in Adolf Hitler’s systematic extermination of Jews. He was pleased to find that some survived and live in Maramures-Sighet, the same town the famous Holocaust survivor and writer Elie Wiesel came from.

“You have the exhibits, which are like history lessons, but until you have that personal connection, that’s when it really hits home,” Schechter said of the museum’s vast collection of artifacts and oral histories.

As for Congressman Lewis (D-Georgia), Schechter knew about the politician’s youthful bravery in the ‘60s but hearing the politician speak in the posh and elite Members Lounge (reserved for members of Congress and their guests only) was an entirely different matter.

“He really was amazing,” Schechter said. “He was such a strong speaker . . . his stories . . . you can tell his determination. He went to jail over 40 times but he stuck with it. He never stopped.”

Heather Tukua and Melody Klemin, two of the more than 100 students participating in the third annual mission, walked through the heart-wrenching exhibits at the famed museum accompanied by two hardy, emotional survivors of the Holocaust. For the students it was a chance and lucky occurrence.

“It was pretty phenomenal to hear their stories as we were walking through it,” said Klemin, 16. Her two new friends were about 7 years old when they were held in a European concentration camp, she said.

Klemin talked about one exhibit containing 4,000 shoes found in the Majdanek camp in Poland.

“Seeing all those shoes you think, . . . wow, it’s pretty powerful.”

The exhibit has this simple poem printed above it:

“We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses/

We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers,/

From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam,/

And because we are only made of fabric and leather/

And not of blood and flesh, each one of us avoided the hellfire.”

Klemin said for the two elderly women, it was too much.

“They tried to hold it in, but a few times they had to sit down and they were, like, quietly crying.”

Ana Cholo-Tipton can be reached at (714) 966-5890.