Studying the Holocaust

National Catholic Reporter, March 26, 1999 by Patricia Lefevere

A unique program in New York created and sustained by a visionary teacher

The black tie dinner at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel here last December was not a typical night on the town for the three teachers and six seniors from Sacred Heart school, located on 91st and Fifth Avenue, 40 blocks north of the famed hotel. It began somberly with scenes of wartime Poland and Ukraine projected from a screen and visible to all the well-dressed banqueters.

The highlight of the dinner was the reunion of five Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and two of their Christian rescuers -- Roman Bilecki, who moved from Ukraine to Rochester, N.Y., six years ago, and his brother, Julian Bilecki, 70, a retired bus driver from a part of Ukraine that was in Poland before 1945.

The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous reunited the Bileckis with five of the 23 Jews they and their families had helped to save during the war. Following the war, the five had emigrated to the United States. They had not seen the Bilecki brothers in 54 years

The Bileckis hid the Jews -- several of them children and teenagers -- from the Nazis when Jews throughout Poland were being ghettoized and transported to their deaths in concentration camps.

The Manhattan-based foundation that sponsored the evening sends monthly contributions of $30 to $150 to some 1,400 Christians who helped save Jews during the Holocaust and who are today old and poor. Christians assisted by the foundation live in 26 nations.

Sacred Heart students were aware of the heroism of some Christians in protecting some of their Jewish neighbors. Sacred Heart students spend six to eight weeks of their senior year studying the Holocaust as part of the yearlong required course in Philosophy and Ethics. The course demands more than watching Stephen Spielberg's Movie "Shindler's List" or attending a lecture by Nobel Peace Laureate Eli Wiesel at the nearby 92nd Street YMCA, which they've also done.

The course looks at the Nuremberg Laws that undergirded National Socialism and the eugenics campaigns that removed the disabled, undesirables and mentally defective from German society. Seniors at the all-girls school, administered by the Religious of the Sacred Heart, also study how Jeers were scapegoated for the economic and political instability that befell Germany as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I. They read Hitler's Mein Kampf and learn of Hitler's idea of the hierarchy of races.

They examine anti-Jewish propaganda disseminated during the Third Reich. They discuss nationalism, subjectivism and cultural relativism and look at genocides that occurred earlier in this century -- Jews at the hands of Russian Cossacks, and Armenians massacred by Turks. They walk one block north to the Jewish Museum of New York for further research and enrichment.

The progression of evil, from prohibitions against local shopkeepers to the extermination of millions, can fill a large canvas. It did for Vina Orden, a student who painted the history of prejudice against Jews in searing oils.

It can also inhabit a miniature puzzle, which is how June Chayama depicted the horror of Nazism -- storing tiny symbols of its brutality behind a Nazi flag, which she opened as if it were a multilevel stage. Both Orden and Chayama, who graduated from Sacred Heart in 1998, chose different media to dramatize what they'd learned during the course.

Another classmate, Nina Caballero, created a two-faced doll -- a Jewish worker on one side, a Nazi officer on the reverse. Three others from the class of 1998 -- Elena Boyd, Abigail Penzell and Patricia Spinelli -- developed a book, titled, The Holocaust: You Choose, Life or Death.

The young women's work contained test cases of ethical dilemmas and asked the reader and the reader's classmates what choices they would make, given such circumstances. Inspiration for the idea came from studying The Sunflower -- On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness by Nazi war crimes hunter Simon Wiesenthal. Last year several of the students participated with pupils from Stuyvesant High School here in a joint conference on the Holocaust.

Dr. Barbara Judge initiated the Holocaust Studies course at Sacred Heart and has headed the school's religion department for seven years. Judge also initiated the inclusion of the "Facing History and Ourselves" curriculum within the senior class study of Philosophy and Ethics. She requires all incoming religion teachers to attend training sessions that focus on Holocaust studies. Karen Peters has taught the course. Thomas Higgins is the current teacher.

It seemed only Judge was surprised when the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous chose her as the first recipient of its Goldman Award. The prize is named for the late Robert I. Goldman, who devoted himself to religious and charitable endeavors, to the arts and to health issues. Judge visited concentration camps and former ghettos in Poland last May as part of a teacher mission sponsored by the foundation.

Judge learned that she had been chosen for the award only on the eve of the December banquet. She was selected from among several teachers at eight New York, Brooklyn and New Jersey schools where Holocaust Studies are part of the curriculum.