"Resistance can be what you do every day. Resistance is remembering and honoring history, resistance is donating to charity. Resistance is going out and voting. Resistance is being here today, listening with full attentiveness and with open hearts and minds to the people here on stage today," junior Nathan Appelbaum said in the opening remarks.
“To forget the dead is to kill them a second time. To forget yourself is a worse thing."
Excerpt from "Dear Diary, May 7, 1945," read by Kennedy Coates, Mikaela Ewing, Yanni Simmons, and Destiney Williamson.
“Alone you will march, with other lonely wretches, to your martyrdom,” junior Max Garfinkel recited, reading from "The Little Boy with His Hands Up," compiled by Yala Korwin.
“It was a frighteningly efficient system of indoctrination ... children were taught antisemitism and loyalty to Hitler in songs and nursery rhymes," junior Annete Kim said, presenting the studies of students in the "Road to Genocide" course. "...Most Germans had no chance to question Nazi ideals.”
"I know of course; it’s simply luck /That I’ve survived so many friends. But last night in a dream /I heard those friends say of me: ‘Survival of the fittest’ /And I hated myself" sophomore Elena Stern, reading "I, the Survivor" by Berthold Brecht
".מחניק פה, אין אוויר, החושך מפחיד"
"It’s suffocating in here; there’s no air, and the darkness is scary.”
Daniela and Yael Rolnik read from “The Last Thoughts of a Little Girl in the Hell of Auschwitz," by Reut L.
“We were good German citizens. That’s why we were German Jews, not Jew Germans,” Ralph Rehbock, Holocaust survivor and guest speaker at the 2019 Holocaust Remembrance Assembly, said.
This letter is the final letter of Renny Wahlhaus, aunt to Mr. Rehbock. Mr. Rehbock and his parents escaped the Holocaust through the help of several upstanders, one of them being an adolescent woman who was house-sitting for the family while they were trying to get the paperwork to get out of Germany. When the Gestapo came on Kristallnacht to arrest Mr. Rehbock's father, instead of giving him up, she called him to tell him what happened, using a code because their phone was bugged.
“The code was: ‘The english lesson has been cancelled.’ It meant my father should never go home again," said Mr. Rehbock.
Katja Edwards plays her part in "As the Spring, Unconquered," a piece composed by Francisco Dean and recorded and rehearsed by the Electronic Music Ensemble for the assembly. Mr. Dean and the ensemble constructed the instruments of the piece from sounds produced by artifacts from the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Several students also gave their talents as voice actors in the piece.
“It’s so important why we have these assemblies every year, because it could inspire someone who is not Jewish to do something,” senior Rachel Zemil said.
Photos by Odysseus Nikas, Maria Shaughnessy, and Macy Beal