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Learning from the Past
Wayne teacher Ernesto Diaz finds good stories in a dark time WRITTEN BY CINDYSCHWEICH HANDLER
New Jersey state law mandates that public school students in grades K-12 be taught about the Holocaust as aspringboard to conversations about prejudice, bigotry and bullying. At Passaic County Technical Institute in Wayne, teacher Ernesto Diaz, who co-wrote the curriculum, is wellsteeped in the subject.
In 2004, he participated inthe Jewish Foundation for the Righteous’ Alfred Lerner Fellowship program, attending aweek ofseminars about the Holocaust at Columbia University. And being aformer Fellow allowed him to be selected as one of JFR’ s19middle and high school teachers and Holocaust personnel to join the organization’ s 2017 European Study Program in Lithuania and Poland.
“ The Holocaust isnot just about Jews,” Diaz, who hails from Colombia, South America, says.“ It could happen to any people from any society. InColombia, when Iwas young, the government used paramilitary forces to kill enemies ofthe state. The students at our school come from many parts ofthe world— they’ re Syrian, Palestinian, Bangladeshi— and they’ ve experienced dislocation and some type ofdestruction. Itry to focus onthe similarities, and how history repeats itself.”
The program was very rigorous, he says. JFR Executive Vice President Stanlee Stahl organized the trip, and noted history professors Sam Kassow and Peter Hayes led discussions over 11 days, guiding the group through their itinerary. After arriving in Vilnius, Lithuania, they toured the medieval Jewish quarter, the wooded site where 100,000 Jews were massacred by Nazi death squads and Lithuanian military forces, and the Kovno ghetto, where a Soviet monument to holocaust victims was erected. In Poland, they visited the former Bialystok ghetto, and Jedwabne, the site of a 1941 massacre of Jews, as well as Treblinka, the concentration camp where the Soviets created a museum during the Cold War.
“ That was the most powerful moment for me,” Diaz says.“ It is so moving. The Nazis destroyed the buildings, so you only see rocks built as a monument to towns they destroyed.”
Though the trip was sobering, it was ultimately uplifting, too, in keeping with the JFR’ s mission to financially support the 400 aged and needy non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. The group took in Sugihara House, the
“ We learned how people put their own lives at risk to save others. The rescuers provided me with the human aspectof ahorrible chapter in human history.”
ERNESTO DIAZ
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site of the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania, where the Japanese vice counsel saved 2,000 Jewish lives in 1940-1941 by issuing visas so they could escape. In Traki, capital of the grand duchy of Lithuania, they learned about a group of Jews known as the Karaites, an ancient sect exempted from the Nuremberg laws. A synagogue still stood in Tykocin, Poland.
“ We spoke to survivors who’ re still alive,” he recalls.“ One was 100 years old. And we met Christians who helped the Jews. We learned how people put their own lives at risk to save others.” Diaz says he will share the lessons he learned with his students. The stories show how individuals behaved with courage on behalf of others— a lesson students can remember when they witness bullying, and are called on to do the same. ■
COURTESY OFPASSAIC COUNTY TECHNICAL INSTITUTE
12 HOLIDAY 2017 WAYNE MAGAZINE