Essay contest examines Holocaust causes

Local high school students are invited to submit essays or poems on how they would respond to peer pressure similar to that felt by German citizens in the days leading to the Holocaust.

The creative writing contest is part of the Spokane Community Observance of the Holocaust service scheduled for May 1. The author will read the winning essay or poem at the service and will be presented with a keepsake commemorating the achievement by James Waller, a Whitworth College psychology professor and the author of Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing. The winning submission will also be published in The Spokesman-Review.

Essays should be between 500 and 1,000 words and should respond to the following:

“Think about what social conditions and individual personality traits enabled ordinary people to become perpetrators of the Holocaust and other more recent genocides. Keeping this in mind, imagine you and your friends dealing with such conditions and the tremendous amount of peer pressure attempting to corrupt your moral compass. How would you respond?”

Students are asked to view the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s three-minute video featuring pictures from a Nazi photo album at nytimes.com/packages/html/arts/20070919_ ALBUM_FEATURE/index.html.

Submissions should be typed and double-spaced in Microsoft Word format, with the student’s name, phone number, e-mail address, school name and grade level on the fist page only, and any reference material should be annotated at the end of the piece.

E-mail submissions to never again-spokane@comcast.net by March 1.