Nathali Arias, a senior at McNair Academic High School in downtown Jersey City, wanted to know more about the Holocaust than what she read in history books. So she made up her mind to be part of a group that traveled to Eastern Europe last month to visit the sites that had a place in one of the ugliest periods in world history.
Afterwards, Arias and some of her tour-mates appeared at Middle School No. 4 in downtown Jersey City to participate in an event with a local Jewish group.
Tuesday’s program, a small affair of 20 people, included students, parents, and representatives from HudsonJewish, a growing Hudson County-based organization promoting Jewish culture. The group hosted the screening along with the Jersey City public school system, to learn more about both the 2009 and 2010 tours taken by local high school students.
“I’m a person who doesn’t get emotional but that trip really hit me deeply.” – Jonathan Bonano
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“I’m a person who doesn’t get emotional but that trip really hit me deeply,” Bonano said before the event. “And when I came back and gave a presentation to my classmates about my trip and the Holocaust, it made me think about a future career as a history teacher.”
The Holocaust was the genocide during World War II of millions of Jews and other minority groups carried out by the Nazi government under German dictator Adolf Hitler.
Learning from the past
Last year, six students from Jersey City public high schools participated in the trip, with three from McNair, two from Snyder High School, and one from Liberty High School.
They traveled to Europe with high school students from New Jersey, Kansas, and California. They traveled through Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland to visit towns and former concentration camps.
“History is one of my favorite subjects,” Arias said on Tuesday. “But I felt that all I learned about the Holocaust was not enough, and I needed to see firsthand the places where it happened.”
Fellow McNair Academic classmate Victoria Bell also attended Tuesday’s program.
The video
The 25-minute video of the 2009 Holocaust Study Tour, as the trip was called, showed the participating students visiting the Wannsee Villa in Berlin, where the Nazis designed the “final solution” to completely eliminate the Jews and non-Jews they had imprisoned.
The video also captures visits to the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp outside Krakow, Poland, and the Terezin concentration camp in Prague, Czech Republic, where they had the opportunity to meet 89-year old Holocaust survivor Pavel Stransky.
The students also made a stop in Trsice, a village in Poland where there is a memorial park to remember Holocaust victims as well as those residents who helped hide a Jewish family.
After the screening ended, June Chang, a language arts supervisor for the Jersey City public school system who coordinated the trip, spoke of its importance. Chang also admitted that he is not sure this trip will continue in the future since it is an expensive endeavor at $5,500 per student.
However, Chang hoped the exposure from the students talking about it in their schools and the “buzz” from media attention will bring support to enable the study tour to continue in future years.
The group also held a Q&A with the students who participated in the 2009 and 2010 tours as audience members expressed curiosity and praise for the trip. One of them was Downtown Jersey City resident Raylie Dunkel, the program director for HudsonJewish, who promised to help Chang to raise money and awareness for the tour.
“These kids should be commended for what they did, and for being so articulate about their trip,” Dunkel said. “It was wonderful learning from them.”
Ricardo Kaulessar can be reached at rkaulessar@hudsonreporter.com.