Every Spring semester since 1996, Edison State College has hosted the Dr. Talbot Spivak Holocaust Memorial Week to educate students and the community about the Holocaust, to honor its victims and survivors, to cultivate tolerance, and to promote awareness of modern-day genocide in support of the world's promise of "Never Again." This year's events will be held from Monday March 18th through Friday March 22nd.
Click here for a complete schedule, including talks from Holocaust survivors, film viewings, special presentations, and round table discussions.
Click here for a complete schedule, including talks from Holocaust survivors, film viewings, special presentations, and round table discussions.
Hendry/Glades Holocaust Memorial Week Reading Group
The Hendry/Glades library has free copies of I Have Lived a Thousand Years by Livia Bitton-Jackson for Hendry/Glades students to pick up, and there will be an informal discussion about the book on April 3rd at 4pm in the library (A-109). There will also be refreshments.
Here is a synopsis of the book:
In a graphic present-tense narrative this Holocaust memoir describes what happens to a Jewish girl who is 13 when the Nazis invade Hungary in 1944. She tells of a year of roundups, transports, selections, camps, torture, forced labor, and shootings, then of liberation and the return of a few. For those who have read Leitner's stark The Big Lie (1992), this is a much more detailed account, with the same authority of a personal witness. Horrifying as her experience is, she doesn't dwell on the atrocities. There is hope here. Unlike many adult survivor stories, this does not show the victims losing their humanity. The teenager and her mother help each other survive; they save each other from the gas chambers. Even in the slaughter of the cattle trucks strafed by machine-gun fire, "words of comfort emerge from every corner." The occasional overwriting about "drowning in a morass of pain and helplessness" is unfortunate. The facts need no rhetoric. On every page they express her intimate experience. After the war, the teenager finds her brother, hears how her father died. She wonders whether she dare enjoy the luxury of being a girl, of "having hair." A final brief chronology of the Holocaust adds to the value of this title for curriculum use with older readers. Hazel Rochman
Here is a synopsis of the book:
In a graphic present-tense narrative this Holocaust memoir describes what happens to a Jewish girl who is 13 when the Nazis invade Hungary in 1944. She tells of a year of roundups, transports, selections, camps, torture, forced labor, and shootings, then of liberation and the return of a few. For those who have read Leitner's stark The Big Lie (1992), this is a much more detailed account, with the same authority of a personal witness. Horrifying as her experience is, she doesn't dwell on the atrocities. There is hope here. Unlike many adult survivor stories, this does not show the victims losing their humanity. The teenager and her mother help each other survive; they save each other from the gas chambers. Even in the slaughter of the cattle trucks strafed by machine-gun fire, "words of comfort emerge from every corner." The occasional overwriting about "drowning in a morass of pain and helplessness" is unfortunate. The facts need no rhetoric. On every page they express her intimate experience. After the war, the teenager finds her brother, hears how her father died. She wonders whether she dare enjoy the luxury of being a girl, of "having hair." A final brief chronology of the Holocaust adds to the value of this title for curriculum use with older readers. Hazel Rochman