Washington – The students walked slowly and silently, absorbing the individual faces of mass murder.
There are the Jews, forced from their homes and into train cars and into concentration camps and into gas chambers. There are the disabled, killed because they were considered less than human. There are the gypsies and gays.
There are shoes they wore, suitcases they carried, a train car that may have carried some to their deaths.
For the 40 Colorado and Nebraska high school students visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the effect is jolting.
“In school all you see are the pictures in textbooks,” said Andrew Reed, 16, of Centennial. “Here you feel what the Holocaust was like.”
Students visited the museum last week as part of the Robert B. Sturm Youth Leadership Mission, run by the Anti- Defamation League. In its eighth year, the program aims to energize students to fight prejudice.
“We hope to teach them the ultimate consequences of bigotry,” said Bruce DeBoskey, ADL regional director, “that bigotry and stereotyping, even in the form of jokes and bullying, can ultimately lead to something as dramatic as genocide.”
The students will spend the next year working on a group project, picking a vehicle for teaching others what they’ve learned. One previous Colorado group devised an ingredient panel – patterned after a food label – with the ingredients for respect. They persuaded a local dairy to put it on 20 million milk cartons. Another created a 30-second public service advertisement that aired hundreds of times across the state. Another made clear wristbands imprinted with “see deeper.”
Students selected this year represent 14 high schools, DeBoskey said. They are of many ethnicities and cultures.
The students carried journals as they toured the museum, jotting down their reactions. Warren Marcus, program specialist for the museum, walked nearby, answering questions and challenging the students to ask themselves questions about what they saw.
Wayne Banks, 16, of Omaha stopped at the exhibit describing how Nazis experimented on people they considered inferior because of such things as nose size or head size.
“These people thought they could just create a Utopian society,” Banks said. “I guess I would have been treated differently because I have a pretty big head.”
The students started linking the history to their own lives.
“I have a little sister; she’s 4,” said Matthew Armistead, 16, of Omaha. “The bond between my sister and I is so great. If she were taken from me, I don’t know what I’d do.
“It’s heartbreaking. If you have anybody that you love, you care about. You wouldn’t wish that on your worst enemy – to be starved, tortured.”
Reed of Centennial stopped at a plain brown suitcase bearing the name of a Jewish family.
“They brought all their trunks and suitcases,” Reed said. “They just had no idea they were going to be killed.”
After seeing the exhibits, students participated in a series of exercises requiring them to think about what and who allowed the Holocaust to occur. Each student assigned a level of responsibility to various types of people on a sheet.
They then debated several of the categories, such as “the gentiles who took over a store just abandoned by Jews,” and “an industrialist who made enormous profits by producing Zyklon B gas.”
Students argued passionately about their choices.
“You are one cog that meshes together to create the whole thing,” one student said after declaring the industrialist responsible.
“But he was just doing his job,” another offered.
The goal is to prompt students to think about who was a perpetrator, a collaborator or a bystander, said museum program specialist Marcus.
“A frequent result is that students often begin to think about their or their country’s response when similar events have happened since the Holocaust,” Marcus said, citing the ongoing genocide in Darfur.
