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Community activist brings Holocaust to Bridgeport classroom

By Cindy Mindell

 

On the Children of the Holocaust set, l to r: Luis Alvarez, Colby Mazzoni, Julissa Ramirez, Gail Ostrow, and Nyla Walton

On the Children of the Holocaust set, l to r: Luis Alvarez, Colby Mazzoni, Julissa Ramirez, Gail Ostrow, and Nyla Walton

BRIDGEPORT – Four young teens stand in front of a backdrop showing the silhouette of a high wall topped with barbed wire and interspersed with watchtowers. They are dressed in jeans and gray t-shirts bearing the kind of yellow-star badge that marked Jews during the Holocaust.

The two boys and two girls are barefoot; their faces are made up to look ghostly, almost cadaverous.

They discuss the lives they never lived, the goals and dreams they never attained, the families and friends and neighbors they lost to the vagaries of the racism and hatred that poisoned Europe during World War II. They are speaking from beyond the grave, four young souls who meet in the afterlife after perishing in Nazi atrocities.

The two sixth-graders and two eighth-graders are actors in the play, Children of the Holocaust by Robert Mauro. Their characters – Anne Frank, David, Rachel, and Michael – bring to the stage four diaries belonging to children who died during the Holocaust, discovered after the war. The playwright imagines what happened to the authors and what their lives might have been like had they survived.

The performance is the culmination of a 16-week Holocaust curriculum taught in sixth and eighth grades at Black Rock School in Bridgeport by social studies teacher Sandra Smolen and community volunteer educator Gail Ostrow.

Ostrow, who lives in the same neighborhood as the school and is a member of the Congregation for Humanistic Judaism, is an adjunct professor of English at Fairfield University. She began volunteering at Black Rock School in 2005, when she organized a group to plant a Peace Pole – a project of Peace Pals International – in the neighborhood. The hand-crafted monument displays the message, “May Peace Prevail on Earth” on each of its four sides, each in a different language. A second Peace Pole was planted in 2007, in front of the school entrance.

As a community volunteer educator, Ostrow has been engaged in teaching and implementing Peace Pals projects at the school, also incorporating the “Choosing to Participate” civics curriculum developed by the Facing History and Ourselves educational organization and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Teaching Tolerance” curriculum, along with materials and knowledge that she has accumulated over time. The year-long curriculum for the sixth and eighth grades has culminated each year since 2010 with a 16-week Holocaust unit.

“’Facing History and Ourselves’ uses the Holocaust as a case study to teach students and educators based on, ‘People make choices; choices make history,’” she says. “By studying the Holocaust, we examine our own biases, assumptions, beliefs, etc. and analyze not ‘what would you have done?’ but rather, ‘what are you doing right now?’ ‘Choosing to Participate,’ the foundation of learning about the Holocaust, is a way to examine history and teach the value of being an ‘upstander’ rather than a bystander, or at the very least, being a witness.”

Teaching Tolerance provides tools for educators who include diversity, equal opportunity, and respect for differences in their teaching, from K-12 and beyond, Ostrow explains. Their free educator materials include the civil rights movement, the Holocaust, gender equality, etc. as a basis for teaching the past and the present.

The final scene from On the Children of the Holocaust.

The final scene from On the Children of the Holocaust.

Ostrow also incorporates a Middle School Teaching Trunk borrowed from the Florida Holocaust Museum, a collection of materials addressing the theme of investigating human behavior and the choices individuals and groups made during the Holocaust. Students examine the concepts of bystander, perpetrator, victim, and rescuer, and how their choices affected their lives and the lives of others.

The four actors, selected in a final audition by fellow students, had a lot of material to draw from as they navigated the play. Though none of them are Jewish, they all found ways to relate to their characters.

“We watched The Diary of Anne Frank and there were real emotions; we could see how scary it was for them,” says Ramirez, who played “Anne.”

They read Night and watched the documentary produced by Oprah Winfrey, Inside Auschwitz with Elie Wiesel. They read Friedrich, a 1961 novel by German author Hans Peter Richter about two friends – one Jewish, one non-Jewish – living with their families in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power, as told through the eyes of the non-Jewish boy.

“Since we know so much about what the children went through, we can relate to what we’re saying in the play, and sort of feel what they’re talking about,” says Nyla Walton, who played Rachel.

For Colby Mazzoni, who played Michael, the theme of the play hit home when he read a line about how the Nazis had killed all four of the characters. Luis Alvarez, who played David, was most struck when he read lines about what his character had wanted to be before the Nazis cut short his life and his dreams.

After the play, the students presented Ostrow with a $100 check to purchase materials for the Holocaust teaching trunk, and a Jewish National Fund tree certificate.

In 2012, Ostrow received a $500 transportation grant from the United Nations Association in Westport to take the students to the UN after the spring Holocaust unit.

In June, Ostrow was awarded a grant from the school principal’s discretionary fund to take the students to Mystic Seaport to see the Gerda III, one of the original Danish boats that ferried Danish Jews to safety in Sweden during the Holocaust. The class had read Number the Stars, a book of historical fiction about the Danish response to the Holocaust.

This year, Ostrow received a $555 grant from the Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Fairfield County to assemble her own teaching trunk and teacher’s resource manual. The grant will allow her to purchase young-adult novels on the subject of the Holocaust, and other teaching materials to ensure that the program can be implemented by other teachers, and with or without the resources from the Florida Holocaust Museum.

Ostrow hopes to see the curriculum package serve as a model for other schools, and is discussing possibilities with several teachers in Bridgeport and throughout Eastern Fairfield County.

Ostrow has a wish list of books and DVDs needed to complete the trunk. “Having enough books so that all the students in a class are reading, discussing, and writing about the same book is an invaluable learning and teaching experience,” she says. “The additional materials support this learning experience and reach students through their many intelligences.”

 

For more information: Gail Ostrow, fullgail@optonline.net

 

Comments? email cindym@jewishledger.com.

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