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Through art, they learn and honor

Hernando High students do research and then create art to tell the story of the Holocaust.

"To forget would mean to kill the victims a second time." - Elie Wiesel, 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor.

The hands reaching toward the sky, ghostlike and frozen in tortured poses seem to be reaching. Crammed together onto a one-foot square, the hands convey the nightmarish image of a mass grave as seen through the eyes of their 16-year-old creator.

"The hands are reaching toward heaven," said Hernando High art student Jessica Roberts, explaining the paper mache sculpture she and fellow student Robert Wilkins made for the school's Holocaust Memorial Day exhibit last week. "It is meant to be sad, but at the same time hopeful. That's just the way I felt when I made it."

The Holocaust exhibit, held April 19 in the school's media center, featured more than 60 student creations, ranging from storyboard collages and essays to artistic renderings.

"When you look at what some of these kids were saying through their creations, you couldn't help but to be touched by it," said Florence Kavanagh, an English teacher with the school's gifted program who organized a similar exhibit last year. "Their ability to empathize with the cruelties of the Holocaust are amazing considering they never lived it."

The exhibit, which also included offerings from students in Roxanne Campbell's art class and Dawn Williams' history class, attracted students and teachers, who filed by in silent reverence. Simple ideas made big impacts. The shattered window pane created by sophomore Lauren Frazier depicted the horrors of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, when rampaging Nazis attacked German Jewish stores and homes. Bryan Wagner's model of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland came complete with railroad cars and barracks strewn with bodies.

At times the student creators were on hand to some offer insight into their projects.

"It's not something that kids are comfortable thinking about," offered freshman Lauren Adkins, who created a montage depicting the 1939 tragedy of the SS St. Louis, an ocean liner carrying Jewish refugees that was repeatedly refused dockage in the United States. "Being able to do research helps everyone to understand that these were real events and they happened not that long ago."

Kavanagh said few subjects in her class have brought such an emotional outpouring from her students. Aside from learning about the historical aspects of the Holocaust, the project assignment also included researching modern-day atrocities that might be compared to the persecution of Jews and ethnic minorities during World War II.

"We didn't have to look too hard," said Brittaney Kiefer. "Just look at places like Iraq, Cambodia and Africa. The number of victims may not be on the scale of what was done to the Jews by the Nazis, but in the end it's just as terrible."

"I want people to be able come and experience what the Holocaust means to young people," said Kavanagh. "I think all of them came away with a perspective that will be with them for the rest of their lives."