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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

High school students honor ‘superheroes’ of Holocaust in art and writing contests

Courtesy of the Spokane Community Observance of the Holocaust

First place, art: ‘The Heroes are Everywhere’

A stained-glass panel by Natalie Kearce, 10th-grade student at On Track Academy

Kearce writes: “My stained-glass panel was inspired by Chiune Sugihara. Even though Japan was allied with Germany during WWII, there was good to be found in the Japanese citizens. Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania, and even though he was ordered not to, he issued visas to thousands of Jews who would have otherwise been sent to concentration camps. The escapees endured a grueling route on the Trans-Siberian Railway through Russia to end in Japan and move on to safety.

The train in my window represents their journey.

Chiune Sugihara saved 6,000 people – each puff of smoke from the train represents a thousand lives.

The boxcars on the train are the colors of the Lithuanian flag and the Dutch-owned island of Curacao, the fictional destination on the visas that were issued.

The top of the window displays the path they would have taken through Russia to Japan – focusing on Japan.

Chiune Sugihara is silhouetted like a superhero – the consulate gate his cape – and the dark-to-light glass represents going from hopeless to hopeful.

The entire piece mimics a superhero comic book page, telling the story.

Chiune Sugihara is a superhero of the Holocaust not only because he saved so many, but also because he did it selflessly and reminds us today that there is good to be found everywhere, even in people we are told are the enemy.”

First place writing: ‘The Rescued’

Poem by Ruby McConnell, Ferris High School, Ninth Grade

Barbed wire fences built up around me

Suffocating

It became hard to breathe

They closed in on me

I was there for 1

2

I think it had been 3 years

Living anxiously waiting for the day

When I could be free

On the inside I wept and whimpered

Yet I never let that show to my tormentors

I obsequiously obeyed their cruel orders

I was treated like a helpless animal confined in a zoo

Trapped between bars

Imprisoned for who I am

A Jew

I no longer remembered what it was like to pray in community

My world turned grey

I gazed around the camp

And saw dejected faces,

And despairing spirits

I waited for what felt like a lifetime in agony

For a miracle

For every second stolen away, my heart ached and broke

Time crawled by at the pace of a broken clock

My childhood wasted away

Slipped from my control like a paper airplane in the wind

While other kids my age lived freely

My very being an aberration

I worked until despair overtook my essence

Objectified and enslaved

Lashed and abused

Until the night when a woman in a nurse outfit found me

I assumed she was another guard, but she wore the Star of David proudly!

Her reassuring eyes stared into mine with empathy

Discreetly, she carried me away from the desolation

She was a miracle more profound than any

Knight in shining armor

More than a flicker of light in a universe of darkness

My life bestowed,

Allowing me hope and joy again

My new life

My brothers and sisters not my blood

My family’s disparate religion

I was hidden with a Christian family

And given a new name

One that did not betray my identity

I am incredibly grateful for her

She’s the reason I can live another day

She saved thousands of Jews

Her determined actions

And sedulous devotion

Make her a role model we still need today.

The Nazi atrocities,

Memories seared into my brain forever

Although I made it out

With bruises on my heart

And a hole in my soul

I touch my arm with its dehumanizing number

And feel the scars that were not upon me before this barbarity

Despite being now free

I will never be the same

I will never sleep a night where I don’t remember the perpetual starvation and aches

When I used to tremble and chills shot up my spine as a Nazi approached me

Now allowed to express myself and live without constant fear

Is all thanks to the woman in the nurse outfit

Who helped me become who I am today.

The Rescuer:

I stumbled around the tenebrous camp

My eyes glancing about, I surveyed my surroundings

It smelled of ash and smoke

Depressed and hopeless souls were all I could see

My eyes landed on one small boy

That stood apart from the others

He had wounds and pale features

Evidence of the trauma he’d been through

But also the ticket to his salvation

Intently I held tight to my black bag

Quietly, I explained the plan

I quelled doubts and cast aside what ifs

Worrisome thoughts had to dissipate and be replaced with confidence

I felt like a runner right before the finish line

I approached the German man smoking a cigar

His malicious gaze pierced me

I stood there petrified trying to obscure my secret

I explained to the guard the child within my bag is “sick”

He glanced at my medical license, then at the boy, and back at me

Waiting and waiting

It felt like years had gone by waiting to know mine and the boy’s fate

Miraculously he let us pass

I strode away with the boy,

Elated, as with every rescue

Although I know it’s not possible, I swear I remember every rescue to the last detail.

These kids gave me the courage and perseverance to save 2,500 souls

Every one of them changed me for the better

They humbled me and reminded me that there is still hope in the world

To save 2,500 Jews meant that there are 2,500 people out there who overcame an unfathomable nightmare

2500

But in result my own abhorrent experience was yet to come

October 20, 1943

I was arrested

I was interrogated

I was hurt.

I closed my eyes in anguish

As they broke my bones

And yelled at me in belligerent rage

No matter the pain they inflicted

No matter the words that left their mouths

I remained silent

I refused to let them win.

I was treated like an animal

Had they forgotten we are both human?

I never regretted my actions or doubted that it was worth it for the lives I was able to save.

I was trapped, miserable, but unwilling to capitulate

Ultimately, I was sentenced to death and

I was certain my life was over.

A melancholy fell over me as I awaited my destiny

But God had another plan for me

I escaped!

I hid for years, waiting for the war to cease

Longing for the day that life didn’t mean constant fear and death sentences

For so arbitrary a reason as one’s genetics.

I am 98 now, and as I look back on my life I am grateful I could be strong and brave

When I needed to be

My dream was to make the world better

One child at a time

I was able to preserve for these kids the blessing of life given to them by our creator

My earnest hope is that they live on happily and are able to praise Adonai again,

Able to have families of their own

Able to recite the Shema and proudly express their Jewish faith

I’ve learned that in a heartbeat life can be stripped away

Millions died in the Holocaust

Lives that weren’t meant to end

Their stories, incomplete, must never be forgotten.

I wrote a poem about my interpretation of what it must have felt like to be an ordinary kid who suddenly finds himself swept up in the barbarity of the Holocaust and miraculously survives. Then I wrote from the perspective of a woman who dauntlessly finds herself in a position to save the lives of complete strangers at peril to herself.

The first speaker in this poem is a child struggling to survive in a concentration camp. The second speaker is Irena Sendler, who put her own life in danger to save others. Of the 2,500 Jews she saved during the Holocaust, most were children. Throughout her ordeal, no matter what, she wore a star of David necklace, hidden from the sight of authorities, expressing her solidarity with the Jewish people.

Irena Sendler was a nurse who found she could use her occupation to facilitate rescues. She would smuggle children into ambulances, bags, and suitcases. Once outside the concentration camps, she would place kids in Christian families and give them new names and identification. She made sure to write down each kid’s real name and where they were hidden on pieces of thin tissue paper. She placed the information in bottles and buried them. When the war ended, she retrieved the bottles and did a substantial amount of research to find these children’s relatives. Her hope was to rescue kids trapped in concentration camps and reunite them with their families after the war.

Irena Sendler was eventually arrested on October 20, 1943. The Germans interrogated and tortured her. She was supposed to receive the death penalty, but she escaped and successfully hid for the remaining war years. She died at the age of 98, leaving behind her incredible legacy of so many lives saved. Her inspiring actions to risk her own life for others makes her a hero of the kind we still need today.

Second place: ‘The Girl Who Fought Nazis’

By Carolyn Bozin, Gonzaga Prep, 12th Grade

At the age of fourteen, Freddie Overstegeen was shooting Nazis. As a child growing up in the Netherlands, she hardly could have foreseen her future role in the war. Freddie grew up in poor conditions with her sister and mother in a village called Schoten, now located in Haarlem, Netherlands. Her mother was a Communist who held strong beliefs about acting against injustices in society. She taught her two daughters, Truus and Freddie, the value of standing up for marginalized people. She was a great role model who showed a willingness to risk her own life to help others – her house was a haven for a family of Jewish refugees.

The values that her mother ingrained in her led Freddie to start fighting against Nazi rule from a young age. However, her first form of resistance was not related to violence. The Nazis had recently invaded and occupied the Netherlands, so Freddie practiced peaceful resistance against them. Alongside her mother and sister, she passed out anti-German pamphlets and newspapers. She also helped cover posters put up for the German war effort. Although not an act of violence, this was still incredibly dangerous. If she were caught, she would almost certainly be killed. However, little Freddie had an advantage over the others: she was a young girl. She looked far less suspicious than the typical member of the Resistance might, even more so than her older sister Truus. Her young looks likely helped her survive as long as she did.

Freddie’s next step was joining the Haarlem Resistance Group. In 1941, Frans Van der Wiel, the commander of the group, visited Mrs. Overstegeen to recruit her two talented daughters. They were immediately put to work. Freddie learned how to sabotage railways and bridges, and most importantly, how to shoot. She and her sister became assassins for the Resistance. While Truus’ older appearance and manner helped her seduce Nazis, Freddie’s strength was following and keeping lookout. Freddie, Truus, and their companion Hannie Schaft performed these “liquidations” as a team.

Freddie Overstegeen has not given a number of how many men she shot. According to her, she and Truus are soldiers, and soldiers don’t tell. The number, however, doesn’t matter. Freddie spent her youth trying to limit the efforts of the Germans to persecute Jews, and that is what makes her a hero. The specific number of Nazis she killed isn’t of importance – rather, what matters is the fact that she killed Nazis in the first place.

What shows the true pureness of Freddie’s character is that she did not have to do anything. She was Dutch, and would most likely have lived through the Holocaust with her family. Despite this, she chose to risk her own life in order to save the lives of those around her. That will to act is what separates her from so many others who passively stood by as Jews were dehumanized, tortured, and killed.

I see Freddie as a personal inspiration and hero. She was a young girl, even younger than I am now, when she began her fight against the Nazis. She went against the gender roles in her society by choosing to shoot a gun and be active in the fight against the Nazis, rather than be passive and stand by as others were harmed. One of the most courageous aspects about her is that she never enjoyed killing. In fact, as she told an interviewer, sometimes when she shot a German all she wanted to do was “help them get up” (Smith). The truly heroic aspect of Freddie’s actions is that she was an unwilling, unsuited killer. She ignored her discomfort, and even accepted the future trauma she would have to live with. She did all this because of her innate sense of justice and helping the vulnerable. She is, without a doubt, a hero of the Holocaust.

Third place: ‘The Essence of a True Hero’

By Nathaniel Corbett, Gonzaga Prep, 12th grade

“How can you live with hate in your heart?” – Noemi Ban. A quote of forgiveness from a true hero.

When I first heard about this essay project, I immediately knew that I was going to choose Ms. Ban as my hero. I had the great honor of hearing her speak in person back in 6th Grade when she came to visit my elementary school, Moran Prairie. Looking back, I remember being incredibly nervous before she arrived. I didn’t know how one can even attempt to relate with someone who has walked through hell and survived to tell the tale. It makes you feel pretty dang lucky when looking at your own life and the cards you’ve been dealt. But my nerves settled as soon as she walked into the room, because she was one of the sweetest and most forgiving people I’ve probably ever been in the presence of and her story is one I will never forget.

Noemi Ban, was born in the year 1922. She lived with her father, mother, grandmother, and two siblings in Debrecen Hungary. In 1944 when the Nazi war machine came to occupy Hungary, Noemi was forced to part with her father who was then sent to a forced labor camp. A few months later, Noemi and her mother, sister, baby brother, and grandmother were shipped off to Nazi-occupied Poland, to a hell on earth known as Auschwitz.

After arriving at Auschwitz, Noemi was forever separated from her family and forced to live in appalling conditions cramped in with around a thousand other prisoners. There she lived for months. I remember a story she spoke of where she described the camp guards giving her and the other prisoners water. She described a trough-like tub that they would fill with dirty water. She said that people would behave as if they were wild animals as they fought to get their share of the murky water. This is an image that has stuck with me for the past six years since she spoke to us. It really portrayed the pitiful conditions where once respectable and dignified people had to resort to such ways in order to merely get a drink.

After enduring this madness for months, Noemi was then shipped to Germany along with many other prisoners to the forced labor camp called Buchenwald. There she was put to work in a munitions factory making bombs for the Nazi war effort. Ms. Ban told us that in making these weapons for the war, they were only prolonging their suffering inside the camps by giving the Germans what they needed to carry on fighting. So, she and some other workers went on to sabotage the bombs by conjoining the wrong wires together. The courage she and her fellow laborers must have had to do something like this amazes me, especially knowing that if she were to be caught doing this, she would have been shot right there on the spot. Later in her story I remember her saying that after the war, she met an Allied soldier. He told her there had been bombs that fell over them that didn’t explode. This gives me the chills to think that some of these bombs could have been the ones that she had made in the camps.

By 1945, the war was coming swiftly to a close. The Nazis were pulling as many Jews as they could further and further back into Germany. This is where the infamous Death Marches came into effect. The Jews of the camps were forced to march for miles and miles further back into Germany away from the advancing Allies and their freedom. It was during one of these marches that Ms. Ban was able to escape. She and a few other women successfully ran away into the woods and were rescued by an American soldier. It was then, after months of horrible suffering and death that she was finally free.

After the war, Ms. Ban became a teacher and traveled around as a guest speaker telling her story. Many years later, I, a little sixth-grader, was privileged enough to hear her story myself. As truly amazing as her story was, and the bravery she had to maintain to survive, I didn’t deem her a hero based on that alone. I didn’t just view her as a hero because of the work she has done since the war, educating people about the horrors that we can inflict upon our fellow human beings. What makes Noemi Ban the essence of a true hero to me is the forgiveness she has in her heart. The fact that after everything she lived through and had to see, she still had the capacity to forgive. That is what makes Noemi Ban a true hero to me

– Written in loving memory of a true hero, Noemi Ban.