"Every year is a great year" says local survivor

Every new year is a great year, says Auschwitz survivor, local resident
By Steve Shay West Seattle Herald
2011-01-01

While many this time of year recall personal ups and downs in 2010, and hold renewed hopes for 2011, West Seattle's Hermine Berner, 91, believes her life is a miracle and, in recent history, each of her years has passed with much optimism.

"People ask me, 'What's your secret?' " said Berner, referring to her sharp and active mind and body. "Why do they ask? You think I look young? You think that's a secret?" she said with a sample of her sarcastic wit.

Berner, who lives near Alki, does have secret of another sort, one she speaks about when gently persuaded. She is a Holocaust survivor who was shipped to Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, while visiting Budapest, Hungary with her father. Their home was in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Read full article...

Kent Teacher, Debbie Carlson, Puts Emphasis on Social Justice

The Holocaust Center is so proud to be working with teachers like Debbie Carlson.

Spurred by Holocaust studies, Kent teacher puts emphasis on social justice in the classroom: Slide show of Holocaust sites

By LAURA PIERCE
Kent Reporter Editor
Sep 14 2010

It was the shoes on a riverbank that brought Debbie Carlson close to tears.

The Meridian Middle School teacher was on a trip to Eastern Europe this summer, and her tour group passed by a bronze sculpture of shoes, lined up on a riverbank. There were work shoes, children’s shoes, ladies’ shoes: a mixture of jobs, genders and ages.

The significance of the sculpture wasn’t lost on Carlson, who happened by this spot in the soft light of a summer day in Budapest, along the banks of Danube River with her tour group, while visiting sites of the Holocaust.

The shoes were the wordless reminder of the men, women and children whom the Nazis or their Hungarian counterparts lined up and shot along the riverbank. The bodies fell into the river, to be swept away by the current, their identities lost to their families and the world.

“When they were exterminating the Jews, they would line them up, and shoot them into the river,” Carlson says, of what she learned happened on that riverbank.

For Carlson, the sculpture was a consciousness-raising moment – one of many she experienced on the three-week trip... Read full article and see the slide show

Teachers in the News

A Summer of Learning
“The whole point is to activate kids,” to get them past the horror and “to understand that they are global citizens and can make a difference.” Jo Cripps is a Seattle Public Schools teacher who was a Memorial Library summer fellow at New York’s Holocaust Education Network in July.

http://www.jtnews.net/index.php?/columnists/item/7860/C7


Teaching the Teachers
Teachers Tammy Grubb and Debbie Carlson describe their experiences and impressions from the Holocaust Center's trip to Budapest and Prague in the JT News.

http://www.jtnews.net/index.php?/news/item/teaching_the_teachers/

A life-long learner's education continues in Budapest and Prague

By Larry Kolano

Larry Kolano is a retired middle school social studies/U.S. History teacher from Longview's Cascade Middle School. For over 40 years he has read and studied books and viewed films covering different aspects of the Holocaust. His formal Holocaust education training includes classes and seminars sponsored by the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center, B'nai Brith, Facing History, and the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. In 2005 JFR awarded him an Alfred Lerner Fellowship. In addition to attending presentations in classroom settings, he participated in the JFR's summer Holocaust trip to Germany and Poland in 2008. For three years he served on the Holocaust Center's education advisory committee. Even in retirement, he conducts Holocaust presentations to civic groups and elementary/secondary classes. Larry currently resides in California.

[Photo by Larry Kolano: Memorial on the Danube. Cast iron shoes.]

For most of my 30 year teaching career I taught my students the basics of the Holocaust. Both teenaged and adult students were amazed by the inhumanity displayed by Nazi Germany and its allies between 1933 and 1945. As a life-long learner, I continue to explore different aspects of the Holocaust.

In 2008 I journeyed to Dachau, Buchenwald, and Auschwitz with other Holocaust scholars. In 2010 I travelled to Budapest and Prague to learn about the treatment of Jews in Hungary and the Czech Republic. Experiences of the Jewish people differed from those who lived in the German Reich, Poland, the Ukraine, and other occupied territories. Until 1944 Hungary's leaders allied themselves with Germany and successfully refused to comply with Nazi requests for Jewish "special actions" and "relocation." When faced with Hungary's defection, after the Red Army crossed its border, German troops invaded and Nazi racial laws implemented. With the assistance of Hungary's anti-semitic Arrow Cross, hundreds of thousands of Jews were rounded up and sent off to Auschwitz or they were simply killed where they were housed awaiting transport. Others were herded to the banks of the Danube, shot, and their bodies thrown into the river. A memorial comprised of bronzed shoes now exists at one of the execution spots along the Danube.

The Holocaust in Hungary was new to me. I had heard of Raoul Wallenberg's efforts to save Jewish lives, but I had never read about or heard about the collection of horrors inflicted on the Jewish population living in and around Budapest. After preparing for the trip by reading The Siege of Budapest, Kasztner's Train, and Hunting Eichmann and experiencing the European tour associated with the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center and Museum Without Walls, I have a much greater understanding of the Holocaust as it developed in another occupied country.

Hearing a survivor in Budapest

After so many years of studying and learning about the Holocaust, on Sunday we learned some interesting perspectives about the Holocaust in Hungary from scholar, Laszlo Csosz. As it turns out, each country was so different in what happened to Jewish populations. The Hungarian deportations of 1944 started in the countryside--but did not continue with total deportation of the Jews of Budapest. About 70,000 of them remained in two different ghettos in the city and were liberated by the Russians. The tradgedy of the 1/2 million Hungarian Jews who were being deported to Auschwitz as the Allies were driving west always makes the losses of the Holocaust seem even more tragic and appalling. Add to this that we learned that students today are not required to learn about the Holocaust and do not hear the many survivors who do live here in Budapest. It made out presentation by a local survivor very poignant as she travels to Germany to speak to schools but does not speak in Hungary. Even so, the sun was shining and we were priviledged to hear Eva's story.

Laurie Warshal Cohen

See a photo of Eva of with the group at the Holocaust Center in Budapest on our facebook page.

Photos from Budapest - day 1

New photos on facebook today from our visit to Castle Hill in Budapest, the labyrinth of caves under the hill, archictecture in Pest, and more...

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=184847&id=140140310737&saved#!/album.php?aid=184847&id=140140310737

Arrived in Budapest!

Check out our photos on the Holocaust Center's Facebook Page -

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=184847&id=140140310737&saved#!/album.php?aid=184847&id=140140310737

You don't have to be signed into facebook to see them. Or better yet, sign into facebook and become a fan of the Holocaust Center's page so that you can follow our trip!

Arrived in Budapest on Friday evening and ate dinner at the delicious Cyrano restaurant in walking distance from our hotel.

Dinner consisted of Gulash soup or Indian carrot and corn soup, paprika chicken with egg gnocchi (or lentils for the vegetarian), and a wonderful fruit/ginger yogurt.

Our hotel, Budapest Panorama Central Hotel, is really a floor of an apartment-like building. Each floor of the building looks at the Center courtyard. The rooms are small but lovely. The owner of the hotel even provided a bottle of wine for each room.