From Harford County Public Schools:
On June 6, 2011, the anniversary of D-Day, C. Milton Wright High School was honored to have two guest speakers who shared with students their first-hand experiences in Europe during World War II.
Mr. Sol Goldstein spoke to 400 students about his experience as an American-Jewish soldier, only 19 years old at the time, who went from Normandy into Germany. He recounted his horror upon reaching Buchenwald, an extermination camp near Weimar. The audience was stunned to learn that none of the American soldiers had even known that concentration camps existed, and how unfathomable the atrocities were that they discovered there.
Bluma Shapiro spoke to 100 students about her amazing story of survival, having been in Auschwitz, three other camps, and a 400-mile death march to Ravensbruck, which was liberated in May 1945 by the Russians. Bluma told the students that she started speaking publicly in 1970 when a professor at Northwestern University denied the Holocaust. She felt those who lived through it must testify on behalf of all those that did not survive to speak about the terrible things that happened.
The students who attended the presentations were moved to tears by Mr. Goldstein’s and Ms. Shapiro’s incredible stories.
Mr. Goldstein and Ms. Shapiro speak to many schools each year to convey their message to the students of today’s generation: stop hate by stepping up when you see others being abused or bullied. Everyone has a responsibility to make sure that such a thing never happens again.
Pictured below, from left to right: Mr. Sol Goldstein, foreign language teacher Lucy Wise-Gladwell, Mrs. Bluma Shapiro and foreign language teacher Carol Wyman.
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