Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Students learn hatred planted Holocaust seeds

Never again is easier said than done.

As students participated in a mock Holocaust exercise, they were reminded that the only way to keep it from happening again is to know the signs. The biggest sign is hatred.

Jo Ann Almquist, an English teacher at Southern Nevada Vocational Technical Center, organized the activity for about 80 students Tuesday.

Swastikas have been appearing on the school's walls lately, keeping custodians busy. The staff, however, had not yet attended to a light pole on the road leading to the school. It was marred by the Nazi symbol accompanied by the words, "Ku Klux Klan."

"You are not here today because you can change what happened, but because you may be able to change what could happen," Almquist said.

During the exercise, students were separated into two groups, those who had braces and those who didn't.

"Braces means students have strong teeth and strong character. Those who don't must be inferior. Doesn't that make sense?" Almquist prompted the students. "The rationale used by the Nazis was based on the same logic."

She asked students to imagine the sense of superiority of people who could kill others on a whim, take the possessions of others without recourse and were allowed to take away the personal freedom of others based on arbitrary differences.

"When a lot of us first learned of the Holocaust, we were told that it was the result of sick minds. Well, I'm here to tell you that Germany did not suddenly lose its mind," said Gene Greenberg, the son of a Holocaust survivor.

He said the Holocaust was not a sudden aberration, but "the culmination of centuries of Jew hating," the same hatred simmering in American society among different races, the same hatred flaring up in the form of "ethnic cleansing" in Rwanda and Bosnia.

"Man's inhumanity to man is alive and well," said Jerry Molen, who sits on the executive board of directors of the Survivors of Shoah Visual History Foundation.

The Foundation, spearheaded by Steven Speilberg, plans to record 50,000 interviews of Holocaust survivors as a perpetual reminder of the atrocities committed in the concentration camps. To date, the foundation has collected 13,000. Molen estimated that there are 300,000 survivors alive today housed all over the world.

Greenberg talked of the two older brothers he never met. They were scheduled for medical treatment but went to the gas chambers instead.

He told the students not to confuse cultural refinement with social conscience.

"There is no connection between a love of Mozart and a love of people. You can play Schubert on the piano and still torture children," Greenberg explained.

"It's easy to become a good lawyer or good teacher, but it's harder to become a good person. Art and culture do not make good people. Without learning to be good, you become educated barbarians. People are not basically good, they need to be taught goodness."

Holocausts do not happen on a whim, he said, but rather a step-by-step process of degradation. He warned students to be wary of those steps.

Amber Neal, a 10th-grader at Vo Tech, agreed with the message.

"It's scary to realize that 6 million (Jewish) people died over there because some people thought they were better than someone else," Neal said. "I totally agree that we can never let that happen again."

Metro Police officers were scheduled to escort selected students to the event, but their participation was canceled after more than 250 people registered complaints. Many callers said police officers need to spend their time on patrol and others worried that the officers would be imitative of Gestapo agents.

Metro Capt. Steve Franks said eight police officers had wanted to be involved in this educational activity, not to scare students, but to inform. They were only to act as escorts, not Gestapo, he said.

"I'm real sorry we couldn't be a part of this," Franks said.

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