View as published in the December 2019 New Mexico Jewish Link with more photos. Also published, New Mexico Kids! Feb-March 2020. AJPA Rockower award, Reporting on Social Justice and Humanitarian Work, and single feature photo award, New Mexico Press Women, 2020.

There is a public school in Albuquerque that studies the Holocaust and sends its eighth graders on a two-week field trip to Poland. They visit a concentration camp and the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, built on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, as well as other cultural sites and museums. This is the The Montessori Elementary & Middle School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a free public charter school, where entrance is by lottery.

The school participates in an exchange program with a Montessori school in Poland, whose families host the American students, and who in turn sends a group of their students here to New Mexico in the fall. The voluntary trip to Poland costs each student $2,500, and they raise money throughout the year with craft and bake sales in order to go. About 25 students went this last year. 

Three eighth graders, Aiden, Alyssa and Jaycee, who are preparing to go to Poland this year, along with two alumni who already went, Sophia, now a high school freshman and Mikeala, a sophomore, met with the Link and talked about what they have been studying in preparation for their trip, and why. Administrator Stan Albrycht and math teacher Alissa Sanchez have led the trips for the last six years, and language arts teacher, Amanda Hagerty, who this year joined them, brought the students together to share what they have been learning. 

All of the students demonstrated an astonishing adult-level maturity of character. thought and openness during the discussion. They were very present, forthright and articulate. They made a positive impression on this visitor, an impression that lingered for days, and that revitalized her sense of hope for the future of humanity.

One student, Aiden, explained why the school is studying genocide: that one of the cornerstones of the school is peace-building, and that they have been learning about genocide “so that it never happens again.” In sixth and seventh grades they visit the Holocaust and Intolerance Museum. One display, the Six Stages of Genocide, made a particular impression on Aiden, that the first stage was simply, bias. 

Jaycee explained that they don’t only study the Holocaust. They have learned about genocides in Rwanda, Armenia, and here in New Mexico. They go on a field trip to the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Arizona, where she was impressed seeing the large-scale historic photographic panel display there devoted to the Long Walk. Beginning in 1864, thousands of Navajo people died when they were marched in winter over four hundred miles to Bosque Redondo, near Portales, NM, and imprisoned in starvation conditions for four years. The students also read a story in seventh grade, “The Last Snake Runner” about when the conquistadors decimated the Acoma people here. 

This year the students read The Sunflower. When the New Mexico Jewish Federation learned about the Montessori school’s program this last year, they allocated funds to pay the entry fee for the students to visit to Auschwitz, and purchased copies for the school of The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, a true story by Simon Wiesenthal. They also read Milkweed, a novel about a boy’s experiences of the Warsaw Ghetto in WWII. However, they all said they got more out of The Sunflower. 

Aiden said, for one thing, because it had real characters with real dialogue, it hit closer than a novel could. The students had to think about what they would have done in Wiesenthal’s place. As a young man, he was  in the Lemberg concentration camp working in a labor detail at an army hospital, when a nurse brought him before an S.S. officer who was dying and who had asked to talk to a Jew—he wanted a Jew to forgive him. The officer was haunted by a crime he had participated in committing, when a building filled with 300 Jewish people was set on fire and as the people tried to escape they shot them. 

Wiesenthal left the officer to die without saying anything. He thought for many years about if he had done the right thing. 

Jaycee described how Wiesenthal also later visited the S.S. officer’s mother, but chose not to tell her what her son had done, he didn’t want to change her image of him. The mother had never seen how her son had changed, how had gone into the Hitler youth and become a Nazi. The students agreed with both of Wiesenthal’s choices. 

Alyssa said she wouldn’t have forgiven the guard, and she also wouldn’t have told his mother what he had done. One reason the students would not have forgiven the guard was because the S.S. officer did not seem to have changed—he asked for just any Jew to confess to, to come to forgive him, as if they were all the same community, not individuals. 

As Jaycee explained, this told the students he really didn’t understand what he had done, and was just seeking to be absolved of his guilt. She said, “I don’t think I could forgive him, he thought of Jews as one, not as individuals.” 

  The story is followed in the book by essays by a diverse group of more than 50 individuals of different faiths and background, some well-known, like the Dalai Lama, Deborah Lipstadt, and Primo Levi. They address the question of whether to forgive or not with varied responses and reasons. One exercise the students did after reading the book was to make sunflowers and write some of the key responses they read on each of the petals. Jaycee recounted how the Dalai Lama said, ‘Forgive but never forget.’

The school has something called a peace table. When they have a conflict with another student, they go to the table and work on conflict resolution. Jaycee explained that, you say, “I feel this,” rather than ‘you did so-and-so.” She said the studies about genocide have helped her in that work. 

Hagerty had learned about The Sunflower when she attended a summer five-day satellite course that the TOLI organization, The Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights, offers to teachers in Albuquerque and many other cities in the U.S. and Europe. “Teaching the Holocaust for Social Justice: The New Mexico Summer Satellite for Educators,” will be held next June 15-19, 2020 in Albuquerque. TOLI is also a beneficiary organization of the Jewish Federation of New Mexico. More information is available at toli.us. 

Doing her own research, Hagerty also found a video online by Eva Kors, who together with her twin sister was subjected to the horrifying, evil experiments carried out at Auschwitz by Dr. Mengele that she barely survived. Kors chose in later life to forgive her torturers. She has spoken publicly about her decision, which remains controversial—many could not understand how she could do that, or that she should.

The students discussed how they could also understand her choice. Alyssa said that it wasn’t easy, that it took time over many years, that it required deep inner work of her own, so that she could be freer of the experience. She was impressed by what Kors said— it was a choice she herself could make, with meaning, whereas as a child victim she had no power over the meaningless acts done to her. “I felt it was really hard for her to forgive; and I would like to be able to be that way.” She felt it showed a lot of strength of character. 

The students agreed it would be much harder to forgive someone if they denied what they did.

Sophia, now a high school freshman, who visited the Stutthof concentration camp with her class this spring, said that “it changed the way I think about history.” Instead of just studying facts “that seemed to have happened ‘oh, so long ago,’ you could actually feel some of the sadness, so you really felt the impact of it all.” Sophia was also struck by what was left today, knowing all that had happened there before. She felt the school’s curriculum had prepared her for the trip, and she has continued to read more books about World War II on her own. 

     Mikeala, now a sophomore, said that still, nothing could prepare them for the reality of being at a concentration camp and the profound experience of seeing the place and the exhibits there. She remembered seeing Otto Frank’s suitcase, the father of Anne Frank. Today when she hears news she says, “Oh, this is happening. I think deeper, what is their life, how bad it really is, how much pain.” She said that it makes her ask, “How can we make things better.” Both high schools students feel they have a greater awareness and understanding of world history than others at their high school.

During the trip the students keep daily journals, and the day of the concentration camp visit, immediately after, they spend time with a theater drama group with a social work component, Group Próg, where together with the actors they sing and dance with songs and gypsy music. The therapeutic activity helps to integrate the shock to the emotions, explained Stan Albrycht, the Albuquerque Montessori’s school finance administrator. He and math teacher Alissa Sanchez, who has put a lot of work into the program, have organized and accompanied the group each year. Albrycht said that parents are not allowed on the trip, that their presence would interfere with the students’ experiential learning.  

In a statement of purpose about reading The Sunflower, Hagerty, who went with the group for the first time this last year, had written that “…students will contemplate the events that happened throughout the Holocaust and their impacts on individuals and the world; discuss their thoughts about forgiveness and what it means to forgive those who have done something that many would say is unforgivable; do close reading of high level text that has content that is difficult to comprehend. . . and participate in multiple Socratic discussions.” 

The students clearly demonstrated that they succeeded in fulfilling this, and more, they are seeing its relevance in current events.

*NM KIDS! Feb-March 2020, added:

Victor Raigoza, president of the board of directors of the Holocaust and Intolerance Museum, said: “The goal of the museum is to reach out to students using different methods to teach about the effects of hate and intolerance. This is a result of the sad trend of today’s students not being taught about the Holocaust. We would like to help achieve the goal of making the history of the Holocaust as part of our state’s mandatory curriculum.” A 2018 study that surveyed 1,350 Americans found that 22 percent of Millennials are unaware or unsure of what the Holocaust is. (http://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Holocaust-Knowledge-Awareness-Study_Executive-Summary-2018.pdf)