Awareness Society Marks 60th Anniversary of the Holocaust
May 25, 2005

“While we gather today to mark the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust, genocide is being practiced in the Darfur region of the Sudan,” stated Madeline Landau, history teacher and advisor to the Awareness Society to an auditorium full of students. To bring the lesson home, Ms. Landau invited Edward Harvitt, a Polish native and Holocaust survivor to speak of his experiences during World War II. Mr. Harvitt was ten-years old when the Nazi forces occupied his native Poland. His tales of his escape into Germany and the kindness of gentiles who helped his mother and him riveted the audience. From smuggling food back into the ghetto where the town’s Jews had been confined to living with a variety of families willing to hide Jews, his story was one of loss and courage. Mr. Harvitt eventually immigrated to the United States, where he started a family and began a very successful building business. This very quiet and unassuming man told of losing all of his childhood friends to the Nazis, getting an education as the only Jew in a German university classroom, and coming to America to build a new life. Fifty years after the Russian army liberated the area in which he was being hidden by a Ukrainian Orthodox family, he returned to visit his guardian angel. The woman who took him in was delighted to see him after so many years and meet his new family. Had she been discovered hiding him fifty years prior, she would have been killed. Hadley Johnson, Form IV brought the assembly to a close by inviting six grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors up to the stage to light memorial candles. She noted that if the Nazis had been successful in their original quest of destroying the Jewish people, none of those students would be here today. After Mr. Harvitt and the six students lit their candles, many more students lined up to pay homage to the thousands that have been murdered in genocidal efforts. The line of students was long; the auditorium was silent; and the darkness faded as each candle that was lit added to the glow in the room. Hadley’s invitation to her classmates simply was, “…please come up to light a candle and let us remember and let us learn and let us get involved to make this a better and safer world for everyone.” Listed below are just a couple of the many places where people can make their voices heard: Darfur Accountability Act of 2005 www.fcnl.org/issues/issue.php?issue_id=104 Save Darfur Coalition www.savedarfur.org © 2005 The Pingry School