Essay on the Holocaust earns teen a scholarship

By AMBER MOBLEY
Published July 18, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT Related Links: Bianca Siegel's winning essay Bianca Rosen Siegel's essay was chosen out of 4,100 entries.

TAMPA - Bianca Rosen Siegel's grandmother survived Auschwitz.

Siegel heard her stories and even retraced her footsteps along the death march in Poland.

"My grandmother's voice was silenced when I was only 10, but I will continue her story for years to come," Siegel, 16, wrote in an essay that won the Holocaust Remembrance Project essay contest.

The Chamberlain High School junior is one of 10 winning high school students spending the week with 12 Holocaust survivors and educators on an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C.

The students' winning essays were chosen from more than 4,100 entries nationwide.

At a dinner Thursday in Washington, each student will be awarded a scholarship of up to $10,000, and one will be awarded a special one-time scholarship of $18,000 in honor of Virginia Tech professor and Holocaust survivor Liviu Librescu, one of 32 people killed during an April shooting at the school.

Each day of the weeklong "transfer of testimony" is scheduled to begin with an address from a survivor of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust Remembrance Project was instituted by the international law firm Holland & Knight in 1994 to commemorate the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps. The contest is designed to encourage and promote the study of the Holocaust. It is the same responsibility that Siegel said her generation should adopt.

In recognizing her family's connection to the Holocaust, Siegel, along with 8,000 other teens from around the world, this year retraced the death march from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Holocaust Remembrance Day. It was a sight that "brought tears to my eyes," she wrote. "I felt my grandmother's spirit of optimism and survival with each step."

For last year's Holocaust Remembrance Day, Siegel brought awareness to the genocide in Darfur, Sudan, by holding a program about Darfur's struggle.

"Through knowing my grandmother and her stories, I have made it a part of my life's mission to focus on spreading awareness about all genocides," she wrote, "both current and past."

Darfur refugee Daoud Ibrahim Hari will share his experiences during the winning teens' trip. They will also will hear from author, lecturer and historian Michael Berenbaum, and New York Times best-selling author Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier.

Amber Mobley can be reached at amobley@sptimes.com or 813 269-5311.

[Last modified July 18, 2007, 00:11:08]