Holocaust Remembrance Garden

The fifth grade intensely studied the Holocaust this year. It included three themes: friendship through the novel Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, the role that youth played during WW II, through the novel Behind the Bedroom Wall by Laura Williams, and lastly the role that hiding played in the means for survival during the Holocaust through the book The Hidden Girl by Lois Metzger and Lola Rein Kaufman.
	The unit was extremely powerful for both the students and the teachers. To enhance the study, the New Jersey Bureau of Education was contacted and they sent a list of local survivors. That led to two magnificent afternoons where we were able to learn first hand about the horrors and the triumphs that Dr. Susan Lederman and Mrs. Halina Kleiner faced during the Nazi occupation of their countries.
Mrs. Kleiner made a very important comment at the closure of her afternoon with the children. She said, “You will be the last generation to hear accounts from actual survivors. It’s up to you to tell our story and make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.” Her words were heard over and over again in the fifth grade classrooms. It is up to us!
	A video was shown about a school in Tennessee that collected 6 million paper clips to see first hand just how many Jewish people lost their lives during the Holocaust. At the end of the video one student said “What can we collect? What can we do?” We decided to let the children talk it out and write down their ideas. The one idea that kept coming up was a garden, a memorial garden.
From there each class made designs and the fifth grade team looked at all of them and took an idea from each. This entire project came from the children and the passion that they feel about the Holocaust and the remembrance of all the people that perished and all of those that lived. We took great pride in watching our 58 students turn a piece of sod into something spectacular. Every time someone walks past the garden, THEY WILL REMEMBER, and we’ve learned that we MUST learn from our past to build the future and it is our future generations that will learn from the soil that was toiled here and commemorated.
	Each year that we have a survivor visit Brookside Place School, we will add to this lovely garden and forever cherish the afternoons we shared with the fifth grade, creating this extraordinary Holocaust Memorial Garden.
Special thanks to Dreyers Farm and Williams Nursery for donating the plants for our garden.