Final Projects

Well, the projects are in and the students had success with this new and provocative venture.

After receiving responses from their European contacts, which included appropriate research links, students were able to proceed with their research projects.  Students collected additional data to supplement the information sent to them via email.  Furthermore, students selected appropriate pictures and decorative elements to supplement and enhance their presentations. Please view the finished product to see for yourself.  Click on the link which will take you to my middle school website.  On the homepage you will find links to the student's projects.  Open them and learn about the Holocaust Memorials around the world honoring those who perished during one of the World's darkest periods.

Although only those who experienced this darkness truly understand what it was. We will never be able to fully comprehend it, but we can at least understand.

I would like to include some of Elie Wiesel's words from his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize  on December 10, 1986.

I remember: it happened yesterday, or eternities ago. A young Jewish boy discovered the Kingdom of Night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed. 

I remember he asked his father: "Can this be true? This is the twentieth century, not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?"

And now the boy is turning to me. "Tell me," he asks, "what have you done with my future, what have you done with your life?" And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

And then I explain to him how naïve we were, that the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe. . . 

Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.

I have nothing more to add.  I will let the memorial projects speak for themselves.

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