Holocaust Survivor Shares Harrowing Tale With Haverford Sophomores

Many high school students are assigned Elie Wiesel's book Night, which tells the author's story of he and his father's time in Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps during the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

But some students get an ever closer look at the Holocaust and the damage it dealt to Jewish families in Europe. Haverford High School Sophomores are lucky enough to have heard from a Holocaust survivor on Oct. 6.

As part of the students' English curriculum, they are assigned Night and the book's message was supplemented by Michael Herskovitz, who lived through the Holocaust as a young man.

Herskovitz's story begins in a small village in Czechoslovakia when German troops took over the village in 1944. Months later, he and his family were placed in train cattle cars and taken to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp where they were selected for either immediate death or hard labor. He was then taken to camps in Austria before British soldiers liberated the camps in May 1945.

Haverford High School English teacher Ms. Elyse Barrett organized the presentation with through the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center's Witness to History Project. The project employs Survivors and liberators as eyewitnesses to the Holocaust to educate youth to emphasize the message that racial, ethnic, and religious hatred are social poisons that affect individual people and families and communities.

The program lasted about an hour and fifteen minutes and with a question and answer session,where students to engaged in a meaningful dialogue with the Herskovitz. A Museum Educator accompanied Herskovits and provided background on Holocaust history as it relates to the speaker and facilitates the question and answer session.

Photo courtesy of Anna Deacon