Photo by Pabel Dejesus

Students recently attended a presentation at Passaic County Community College. They were both interested and horrified by the subject matter. The presentation memorialized the horror of the Holocaust, but the images of human scratch marks on the wall of a gas chamber at a Nazi death camp in Auschwitz, human hair matted and turned into a carpet, human ashes dumped into urns and stacked against a wall, were horrible to see.

The memorial was presented by Professor Elliot S. Pollack of PCCC.

“The Holocaust is a reminder of how horrible people can be,” he began.

Though he was not a Holocaust survivor himself, or even the child of a survivor, he told students, “I believe that every generation has an obligation to teach the next generation about what came before.”
The message of the day’s activities was not just the horror of the Holocaust, something that has been taught here at PHS, but that this horror needs to be remembered and discussed because it has happened again and again since World War II. The recent genocide in Sudan’s Darfur, Bosnia’s “ethnic cleansing,” and even recently, Syria’s civil war, are all genocidal holocausts. He said they all have one thing in common; “They all started with prejudice.”

While many of the students in attendance admitted that they all had experienced prejudice in one form or another, they all agreed that nothing could prepare them for the depth of prejudice they viewed in a video that Pollack created himself of the Auschwitz and Terezin concentration camps.

Students were visibly uncomfortable as this horror was exposed on the screen.

The message of his presentation was not lost. It hit home, and students leaving the event, some shaken by the display of inhumanity, were all glad that they had been there.

“It was good to see,” said Junior Angelo Ariza. “We can really change things, be better for the future.”

By Pabel Dejesus