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These are just a few of the many touching poems that my
students wrote over the years. Even after nine years of
retirement, I am moved by them. I believe that the balance
I struggled to achieve between knowledge and expressions
of shared humanity—between the head and the heart—is
responsible for the transformation in learning that we
experienced.
The more we know of the Holocaust, the more we
change, the more we find ourselves circumscribed
by the event we sought to transcend and from
which we had hoped to pull free....The more
we know, the more we shall remember.
-Terrence Des Pres
As my retirement from teaching brings a part of my journey
to a close, I find the questions with which I began this paper
still pertinent. Has our work together in the classroom
aroused conscience or compassion in my students? Will my
students help to make the world a little safer or more
humane? I will probably never know, but I hope, as
teachers must, that vestiges of this journey will abide with
the students for many years to come. I believe that 8th
grade student Lona Smith, who wrote and delivered the
dedication speech for the Memorial to the Children of the
Holocaust that her class had created, encourages my hope
of this in her final words:
“We are the youth of today, and we, the class of 2000,
dedicate this memorial to the children–not just to those who
died, but to those who suffered and to those who will
continue to suffer as a result of the Holocaust. We hope
that wherever they may be, they know that we are the
children, we are the future, and we remember.”
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