Morningside Elementary School fifth-graders have been visiting the William Breman Jewish Heritage and Holocaust Museum for more than 15 years in conjunction with the Georgia Performance Standards unit on World War II. Last year, 15 Morningside fifth-graders took part in the 70th anniversary commemoration of Kristallnacht at The Temple on Peachtree Street. This year, the entire fifth-grade class, about 145 students, took part in another meaningful project, making Morningside the first public school to do so.
The project, called Stones of Remembrance, seeks to honor the children who died in the Holocaust and thus were never given a proper burial or marker. The Breman has collected the actual names of hundreds of the 1.5 million children who died in the Holocaust, and each Morningside 5th grader had the opportunity to decorate a stone to honor one of those children by name. The stones will be used in a ceremony on April 11 at the “Memorial to the Six Million” in the Greenwood Cemetery on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Morningside’s fifth-grade classes visited the Breman last week. Students were led through the Holocaust gallery in small groups by trained docents and were then honored to hear a Holocaust survivor (or child of a survivor) tell his/her story in an intimate setting. One of the survivors who spoke was Benjamin Hirsch, prominent Atlanta architect and the designer of both the “Memorial to the Six Million” at Greenwood Cemetery and the Holocaust gallery at the Breman. “The Breman does a phenomenal job of making the lessons of the Holocaust relevant to our students. The docents teach them about the politics of the times as well as the horrors of the Holocaust, but they also emphasize the many acts of kindness, courage, and bravery that were undertaken during that time. Students come away with a resolve to keep the survivors’ stories alive and to strive to stand up against prejudice and hatred that they witness in their own lives,” stated Beth Burney, fifth-grade teacher and the organizer of the trip.
When the students returned to school after the field trip, each class took part in a short lesson about the importance of names. Students had been asked to research the origins of their names, and they shared that information with their classmates. They were then reminded that, during the Holocaust, people’s names — and therefore identities — were taken from them when they were assigned numbers in the concentration camps and were buried in mass graves or cremated with no gravestones to mark their passing. Following the lesson, each child selected the name of a child who had died in the Holocaust and decorated a stone in his/her honor. Many students chose names of children who were from a country where their ancestors had lived or one with the same birthday as theirs. One student stated, “I didn’t even know her, but I feel like I miss her.”
Hat tip to Ms. Burney for this article.