Aranka Siegal Spreads Hope to Middle School Students, Asks Them to Fight Prejudice Wherever They Find It

– By April Miller –

On May 15, Rye Middle School eighth graders learned about the horrors of the Holocaust from a better source than any textbook. Aranka Siegal, who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen as a young teenager and wrote two novels, "Upon the Head of the Goat," and "Grace in the Wilderness", based on her experience, spoke to students as part of their study on World War II and the Holocaust.

Mrs. Siegal, a former Westchester resident, has been speaking to RMS, Rye Neck and other local schools for 25 or 30 years by her estimation. She is unusual, because many Holocaust survivors aren't able to talk to their own families about what they went through, let alone strangers.

"I survived somehow when millions of others did not," she said. "It would be wrong if I moved on with my life and didn't tell the story for those who can't."

After being moved by her visit last year, RMS Social Studies teacher Pam Park and English teacher Craig Dreves applied for a grant through the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center, which educates teachers on the Holocaust. The grant provided for the two to spend a weekend in Washington D.C., studying at the Holocaust Museum.

While there, Ms. Park and Mr. Dreves learned about the Butterfly project, sponsored by the Holocaust Museum of Houston. As part of the project, students read poems that were written in secret by children imprisoned in Terezin Concentration Camp, outside of Prague. They then are asked to create a butterfly inspired by the poem they read. The Holocaust Museum of Houston is trying to collect 1.5 million butterflies made by students, to honor the same number of children who were killed during the Holocaust.

"The butterflies represent freedom, lost dreams and hope," said Mr. Dreves.

This year, RMS incorporated the project. Students made butterflies and hung them in Mr. Dreves' classroom for two weeks. Then during a ceremony to close the unit, students were asked to read aloud the poem that inspired their butterfly. At the end of each poem, the student was told whether or not the author had survived. If not, their butterfly was cut down. Eventually, only five of the original 40 were left hanging.

If the butterfly exercise made the Holocaust more real to the students, to then hear stories of survival and loss from someone who lived it was especially moving.

"The kids were in awe when Aranka spoke," said Mr. Dreves. "It was the one time you'll see students of this age just listen."

The class presented a butterfly to Mrs. Siegal, which brought her to tears.

"I know the story of Terezin," she said. "I've read the poems by children who didn't survive. I know that any one of them could have been me."

Mrs. Siegal said she tells her story to middle school students because they are young enough to still have open minds, but old enough to understand the magnitude of the subject.

"They ask really good questions," she said. "Every time I talk, someone asks me if I hate Germans, and they can't believe it when I say I don't hate anyone."

Not even the man who showed up while she was speaking to his son's class, grabbed her microphone, and told her she was a liar, that the Holocaust never happened.

"Of course it makes me angry, but I just thought about his son and how embarrassed he must have been," she said. "And I am afraid that if I felt hate, it would somehow spread to my children and I couldn't bear that."

Teaching children about the danger of hate and prejudice is the only way to stop something like the Holocaust from ever happening again, according to Mrs. Siegal.

"What happened during that time doesn't make sense," she said. "How did 11 million people perish and people just stood by and let it happen? I want students to learn a lesson from this. If a child is being mistreated because he is from a different country, or looks different, step in and do something to stop it. Don't stand by."

At 77, Mrs. Siegal is one of the youngest Holocaust survivors.

In recounting her tale of survival to Rye Neck eighth graders May 16, Mrs. Siegal detailed how, after first being sent to Auschwitz with her parents and five of her siblings, she and an older sister ended up in Bergen-Belsen, where prisoners who were too weak to work were sent off to die. In all, an estimated 50,000 prisoners died at Bergen-Belsen, most from typhus, many from starvation.

She contracted typhus and dysentery and weighed only 60 pounds when the concentration camp was liberated in 1945. She was 15. The liberation brought her no joy, Mrs. Siegal tearfully told students. She had lost her parents and all but one of her siblings and realized life would never be the same. “April 15, 1945 was the saddest day of my life,” she recalled.

Though Aranka Siegal will leave behind her books and recorded testimony, which can be heard at Holocaust museums, she is counting on teachers to continue teaching the subject to the next generation.

"We will not live forever, but the things that happened to us must never be forgotten."