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HAVERHILL — Students at Haverhill High School are the first in the nation to engage in live, narrated tours of two Nazi concentration camps – Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau, where unimaginable atrocities took place during World War II.
Anyone can watch documentaries and read books about the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in their quest to eradicate the Jewish people of Europe, but short of visiting Auschwitz in person, local teachers say these live tours are the next best thing while also allowing students to ask questions of a knowledgeable tour guide.
Through a partnership with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation for Genocide Education, the school is introducing these broadcasts as part of the freshman world history curriculum that calls for the study of genocide, not only the one that killed 6 million Jews in Europe during World War II but also genocides in Armenia, Rwanda and Cambodia.
On Monday in the UMass Lowell iHub in the Harbor Place building on Merrimack Street, more than a dozen high school seniors were among the first to participate in a live broadcast from Auschwitz where more than 1.1 million men, women and children lost their lives.
Their tour guide, a woman from Poland, interspersed her walking tour of the Auschwitz camp with real images of prisoners waiting to be executed in one inhumane way or another.
A camera followed the guide through cramped former military barracks once packed with prisoners who were forced to sleep on hard floors before eventually being led to underground chambers where they were exterminated with poisonous gas. Images of prisoners crammed into tight quarters were overlaid onto the now-empty death buildings.
Meghan DeLong, the district’s history coach, told a crowd that included various school and city officials that Haverhill is the first school district in the country to bring this experiential learning to students “in order to combat hatred in the world and to prevent future genocides.”
During an intermission, several students talked about their impressions of the broadcast. Some of them had enrolled in a course titled “Holocaust and Crimes Against Humanity”.
“It’s like you’re actually there visiting Auschwitz,” said senior Lucas Harvey. “What surprised me is how many people they put into such small spaces.”
Senior Asil Nguyen said the live, narrated tour featured more intense images than she expected.
“My knowledge of the death camps was not as detailed as this,” she said. “I participated in an earlier tour with a different guide and I was crying.”
Senior Shea Kelley said what he saw on the video screen was a lot to deal with emotionally.
“It’s all crammed together in small spaces with unsanitary conditions, it’s terrible to see,” he said.
The guide continued her tour at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, about two miles from Auschwitz, and talked about how train cars overloaded with prisoners arrived before the people were led into underground gas chambers under the guise of taking showers.
“Here, I learned how to starve and how to suffer,” a survivor of the death camp said in a recorded interview shown on two large video screens.
“Trains from across Europe arrived here,” the tour guide said while walking the same path. “The gas chambers operated day and night in the summer of 1944.”
“By the time Germany entered Hungary in March of 1944, the gas chambers and crematoria were operating at full capacity,” a prerecorded voice said. “In the spring of 1944, a special ramp was built to shorten the distance to the gas chambers. Those selected who were fit to work were abused, enslaved and exploited.”
By fall 1944, the Nazi SS stopped the exterminations and began to deconstruct their crematorium, the tour guide said, and when the Nazis realized they were defeated, they tried to destroy all evidence of their crimes while continuing to kill Jews until the camps were liberated by Soviet forces in January 1945.
The tour guide noted that as the Nazis left Auschwitz, they took many prisoners to other camps, which were subsequently liberated, but left behind about 7,500 of the weakest and sickest, who required months of medical care.
The screen was overlaid with images of what the gas chambers looked like when they were intact, with images of the rubble that remains today.
Tom Jordan, recently retired dean of history at Haverhill High, told the tour guide that there is an increasing number of Americans who seem open to the idea that the Holocaust did not happen as is stated and is “an exaggeration.”
He asked what documentation or other evidence is used to prove that the Holocaust did occur.
The tour guide noted the existence of the death camps’ remnants, including the crematoriums, along with the testimony of survivors, the contents of a museum at Auschwitz created by former prisoners, and other evidence.
“Unfortunately, we have the lies that people spread and it can spread stronger than the truth,” she said.
History teacher Ted Kempinksi said he became aware of these tours during a visit last summer to Auschwitz where he attended a professional development program on how technology is changing Holocaust education.
“The Auschwitz Foundation was doing a presentation on this very tour we saw today,” he said. “I asked the question, ‘How can I bring this to Haverhill.’”
Kempinksi said he brought the idea back to Haverhill and learned that DeLong had already applied for a grant that allowed the school to revise its curriculum to incorporate these tours.
“A tour like this is a real privilege,” high school senior David Martinez told the crowd. “To see it live humanizes the stories in a way I don’t think you can really understand through textbooks or documentaries. You feel a real connection and it’s very moving.”
Rabbi Ashira Stevens, spiritual leader of Temple Emanu-El in Haverhill, said that in the 20th century, baseless hatred led to the systematic persecution and mass murders of millions of people, including 6 million Jews throughout Europe, and that baseless hatred in the form of antisemitism and bigotry is on the rise throughout the country.
She added that the hate speech in the news and on social media is “frightfully reminiscent of the time leading up to the Holocaust.”
“We must continue to teach about what led to the Holocaust and how utterly horrific, devastating and far reaching it was,” Stevens said.
The rabbi said the collaboration between the Auschwitz Foundation and Haverhill Public Schools will offer students a powerful opportunity to witness the horrors of the Holocaust, see firsthand the conditions at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and learn about the ideologies that led to the atrocities committed by the Nazis.
To conclude the event, the educators presented a glass memento to Wojciech Soczewica, director general of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation in recognition of the partnership with Haverhill Public Schools.
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By Mike LaBella | mlabella@ieagletribune.com
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