Triad teachers, students preparing for once-in-a-lifetime trip abroad to learn about Holocaust
But there are dozens of North Carolina public school teachers from the coast to the mountains preparing for what will likely be a once-in-a-lifetime experience abroad learning about the Holocaust.
That includes Damian Adame, who just finished his fourth year teaching World History to ninth-grade and tenth-grade students at Page High School in Greensboro.
'It's a mixed bag. There are a lot of emotions that go into it,' Adame said. 'There's excitement because this is honestly something that I've wanted to do. But, at the same time, it's also a little daunting.'
Adame is one of nearly 40 North Carolina public middle and high school educators selected to travel to Poland to learn about the Holocaust in the very places where much of it happened. Led by retired Greensboro Rabbi Fred Guttman, they'll spend eight days visiting death camps, ghettos, communities and museums and eventually bring it all home to their students.
'One of the cool things about this trip is it's not just a tour of the camps. It's not just a tour of these areas where the events occurred,' Adame said. 'It's a walking classroom. We're going to learn and take all these things and implement them in our classroom in a brand-new way.'
The trip is funded by many organizations and private donors, including longtime Holocaust education advocates Zev and Bernice Harel of Greensboro. Zev is a Holocaust survivor who was sent to several death camps as a teen, including Auschwitz and Ebensee. He spent decades sharing his story all over the world.
'I felt comfortable doing that because the Holocaust was an experience that not too many survive,' Harel said. 'Each time [I was] speaking about human adaptation and what survivors did in order to make it possible to survive.'
'At some point, the survivors realized that if they didn't start talking, everything that happened and everything they witnessed would disappear with them eventually,' Bernice said.
Now, at 95 years old, Zev isn't able to share his story like he used to. So in a lot of ways, this Holocaust education trip is picking up where survivors left off, ensuring stories such as Zev's continue to get told.
'Every person that goes on this trip is hopefully going to have a deeper understanding, but it's also going to give them a deeper connection,' Adame said. 'It's going to make us more motivated to give a better scope of what's going on with this event.'
The teachers leave for Poland on Monday, and FOX8's Katie Nordeen and McKenzie Lewis have been invited to join them.
You can expect their special stories on Teaching the Holocaust in September.
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