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Publication Date: Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Cover story: Lessons from the Holocaust -- at a Catholic school
Cover story: Lessons from the Holocaust -- at a Catholic school
(May 19, 2004) Sacred Heart Prep teacher Mark Davis makes it his mission to give students a deep understanding of the Holocaust
By Rebecca Wallace
Almanac Staff Writer
The first image is handsome, almost reassuring: a beautiful man and woman gazing into the sky.
Then you notice the title, "The Ideal Aryan Couple." And the pictures start to degrade.
In this Nazi propaganda campaign from the 1930s and 1940s, the posters get darker and more graphic as time goes on, decrying Jews with grotesque stereotypes, all hook noses and evil faces. Some steal your children. One has a snake's body.
"It was really disturbing," says Nefara Riesch, a junior at Sacred Heart Prep in Atherton who put the posters together with another student as part of a school project.
Where did she find the images? In a history book?
"On the Internet," she says. "They still sell the posters on neo-Nazi Web sites."
Whether we like it or not, history is alive. The power of legendary odysseys and quests lives on in the heroes of today, but unfortunately so does much of the past's negativity: racism, stereotyping, and genocide.
Teacher Mark Davis listens intently as Nefara speaks. He's well aware of the disturbing links between past and present, which is why he created the school's Holocaust Study and Social Justice Center.
This nook off Mr. Davis' English classroom is packed with books such as "Auschwitz and the Allies" and "Kaddish for a Child Not Born," as well as titles on civil rights and a novel by an African-American slave. There are computers, CD-ROMs and DVDs. Other student projects join Nefara's, including a wooden box filled with ashes, covered with photos of child Holocaust victims.
A quick grin crinkling his eyes behind large glasses, Mr. Davis pushes a Michael Moore book over on a shelf and says with a laugh, "He doesn't quite fit in here."
More serious, he reaches for Primo Levi's "The Drowned and the Saved," one of the Italian writer's books on being imprisoned at Auschwitz.
"If you could only read one thing about the Holocaust, read that," he says with conviction.
Mr. Davis, who has taught at Sacred Heart for 16 years, opened the center in August 2003, with help from a parent's large donation. Students can take an elective course called "Literature of Witness," learning about the Holocaust and then moving on to related topics, such as the Armenian and Rwandan genocides and eugenics, the notion of racial purity that has often reared its head in American history.
Other students and community members can take part in workshops and listen to speakers, who have included Holocaust survivors and a representative of a watchdog organization in Sudan.
The material can be emotionally draining for students. But Mr. Davis says they respond well because they know they're learning about the difficult realities of life.
"Young people feel that we're not giving them the truth most of the time," he says.
Unlikely location?
The books and movies in the center are filled with stars of David, but just next door in Mr. Davis' classroom a cross hangs on the wall.
A Catholic teacher in a Catholic school might seem an unlikely catalyst for such an in-depth program on the Holocaust. While many religious schools have teaching units on the topic, creating a whole center is quite another matter.
"He's going to make history," Lissa Schuman, director of the speakers' bureau at the Holocaust Center of Northern California, says of Mr. Davis. "This is somebody who's going to be used as an example for other social studies departments."
What sparked Mr. Davis' study of the Holocaust? Simple curiosity and interest that grew intense, starting with his reading "The Diary of Anne Frank" as a beginner teacher and then his six-week Holocaust course at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.
He says of the course, "It was deep, it was heady, it was painful."
The topic threatened to become overwhelming, but then a teacher told him: "It's supposed to be emotional. It's OK to tell students you're feeling emotional, then they know it's a normal response."
Mr. Davis then became a Mandel fellow with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Along the way, he has made friends with many Holocaust survivors and been impressed by their courage and hard-earned wisdom.
Many of the survivors, he says, were saved during the war by kind nuns and priests who hid them. "They love that I'm a Catholic school teacher," Mr. Davis says.
But Mr. Davis also educates his students about the less sympathetic actions in the Catholic church during the Holocaust, he says.
"There's also a negative history with the Catholic church, the non-response of the Pope at the time. He had the chance early on to take a stance and didn't. And some bishops were collaborators. Students need to know this," he says. "It's good to complicate students' thinking."
That position impresses Ms. Schuman, who says, "There's all sorts of reasons why a Catholic school wouldn't want that taught at their school."
After observing Mr. Davis' classes, Ms. Schuman says the students respond well to the complex and high level of discourse there.
"Whenever he asks any questions at least half of the kids' hands go up in the air. I got the sense that the kids really feel like he is one of them, just a little older and a teacher," she says. "And he never has ever said, 'That's the wrong answer.' Everybody's opinion matters."
Bridging a painful divide
Kristallnacht was Frederick Tubach's eighth birthday.
On a video screen in a dark auditorium at Sacred Heart, Mr. Tubach recounts his memory of November 9, 1938, during the anti-Jewish riots in Germany. At one wrecked Jewish house, goose feathers covered the ground like snow, he recalls. Nearby he found a candlestick in the street, so he cleaned it off and took it home.
"I don't know whether I was stealing something or saving something," he says.
Mr. Tubach's father was an officer in the Nazi party. But the documentary, shown at Sacred Heart on May 12, also contained a very different perspective: that of Bernat Rosner, a Hungarian Jew who was sent to Auschwitz at the age of 13.
The two later became friends in California and wrote a book together called "An Uncommon Friendship."
The film includes a third person, Eva Leveton, who lived through the air raid sirens and bombs of wartime Berlin with her Christian mother after her Jewish father got a visa to go to Holland.
After the film, Mr. Rosner and Ms. Leveton spoke and answered questions from the students, along with Mr. Tubach's wife, Sally.
Mr. Davis worked with a Hayward group called Facing History and Ourselves to organize the event, which attracted adults and students from several high schools.
"This is the last generation of students who will hear direct testimonies from survivors," Mr. Davis says.
Many of the students were impressed by seeing that even the most far-reaching differences can be overcome.
"They were from complete opposite sides," Sacred Heart senior Chris Bayol said of Mr. Tubach and Mr. Rosner. "It seems like they would hate each other ... but it's amazing to see goodness out of that."
Chris, who seemed pensive after the film, called the event "moving" and "intense." When asked what else he had learned that night, he said slowly, "There's just so much to take in."
Claire Schmitt, a sophomore at Carlmont High School in Belmont, said the evening brought history books to life: "You get to hear people who were actually there."
Several students said they were moved by the message put forth by filmmaker Mariel McEwan that individuals need to stick up for what's right when they see injustice around them.
"If you object to what's happening, the earlier you speak up ... the more you can change the course of history," Ms. McEwan told the crowd.
History today
The power of one small voice is a common theme threaded through Mr. Davis' teaching at the Holocaust center. That's a big reason why Sacred Heart schools director Joseph Ciancaglini praises the center for living up to the school's "deep commitment to social change."
In the center, one of the strongest lessons coming out of the Holocaust is illustrated by a posterboard project on the "White Rose" resistance movement, which was made up of young people in Munich disseminating anti-Hitler leaflets and working against Fascism. A rope noose hangs over the board.
The organizers were caught and executed after one of their satchels opened up in a stairwell and the leaflets fell out, Mr. Davis says. But the lesson in courage lives on.
"When students read about this -- that someone can stand up to the Nazis at the age of 17 -- they say, 'What am I doing sitting here when someone's telling a racist joke across the hall?'" Mr. Davis says.
Meanwhile, Nefara Riesch, the Sacred Heart student who worked on the project about anti-Semitic propaganda, is busy taking her own stands. She's writing a paper about institutional racism, dealing with segregation in America and apartheid in South Africa. In addition, she's quick to speak against the stereotyping she sees nowadays.
"African-Americans in movies are the criminals, and Muslims are depicted as terrorists," she says. Propaganda, she adds, "isn't just from the Holocaust. It still exists today."
For Nefara, the link between past and present couldn't be clearer. And when asked what she wants to do after finishing school, she doesn't miss a beat: "I want to be a history teacher."
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