The morning event at Avonworth Middle School unfolded on this cool Wednesday near winter break as a series of images.
Paperbacks — The Children of Willesden Lane, The Book Thief, The Diary of Anne Frank — mounted on colored strips of wood.
Portraits of young Muslim girls in hijabs weeping, posed alongside images of persecuted Jews. Another of a rose-shaped heart piercing through a sea of barbed wire.
Student Henry Wagner, drawing parallels, literally, between the book The Berlin Boxing Club and the Oct. 27 shooting at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh by sketching an iconic, yellow Three Sisters bridge buttressed by the Star of David.
And there, in a side table at The Eighth Grade Holocaust Literature Themes Exhibit, stood Amanda Roberts, inspired by an Elie Wiesel speech and the plight of civilians in modern-day Yemen.
“My theme was indifference throughout history,” she said, “the indifference to step in.”
Avonworth teachers Kathy Galecki and Melissa DeSimone started to diversify and intensify Holocaust studies at the North Hills school after taking part in a Classrooms Without Borders study-seminar to Poland in 2017. Kathy said she doesn’t have to work hard for her eighth-grade reading students to draw lines between Germany in the 1930s and contemporary world issues like immigration, prejudice, and social inequity.
“Students are making these connections on their own. When they read Holocaust literature and then listen to the news today, they see patterns in history,” Kathy said.
“We want them to realize the things we’re teaching them are not in isolation,” added Melissa, a middle-school gifted support and enrichment teacher.
Another key collaborator among Avonworth School District and Classrooms Without Borders has been Susan Stein, the actor/educator behind the one-woman play “Etty,” which is based on the writings of a young Jewish woman living in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Susan recently completed a three-day residency in Avonworth,where she talked about themes of bigotry and oppression, and had students read real-life journals of young people alive during the Holocaust.
Avonworth Superintendent Tom Ralston, who attended the Classrooms Without Borders study-seminar to Poland in 2017, says it’s all part of a larger plan for the districtto think big.
“I’m always looking for ways to expand my thinking and who I am, and bringing that back to the students here,” Tom said. “Travelling [to Poland] gave us all these ideas about how to amplify that for our students. Our kids are thinking about these things and getting them. The Holocaust is a theme that’s perpetuated over history.”