Andrew Guckes | Staff Writer
Holocaust survivors are dwindling in number, leaving younger Jews without the firsthand perspective of the most gruesome massacre of Jewish people in history. With that challenging dynamic comes concern for the future: How do we ensure that future generations understand the weight of an issue as it grows further in the rearview?
At a number of schools across the country, the answer to that question comes in the form of the Names, Not Numbers program. The program brings Holocaust survivors to schools to speak to students, like other programs. However, it also includes a component that makes the interactions more meaningful.
As a part of the Names, Not Numbers program, students research a given survivor, learn about their life and then craft interview questions. They conduct an interview with the survivor in a small group with other students. Noah, a 14-year-old student at Kellman Brown Academy in Voorhees Township, New Jersey, explained how this impacted the process.
“To do the research ourselves and then be able to interview them was really breathtaking, because we got to see a glimpse of their life and ask formal questions based on their biography,” he said. “But actually seeing them in person and interviewing them personally and imagining a story unfold in real time [as] they’re explaining the exact details of what happened is really eye-opening.”
The program is a national project that is offered to students of all ages, with said students learning skills associated with documentary filmmaking and journalism before and as they speak to Holocaust survivors. They interview survivors on film before editing the footage and compiling it into a film along with their peers. The end result is a unique documentary that shares the stories of Holocaust survivors, premiering in front of the proud students and their families who helped create it.
Isaac is a 12-year-old student at Kellman Brown who said that the Names, Not Numbers program gave him and his peers a chance to dive deeper than they usually would into a single person’s story, showing them how unique every person’s account of the harrowing events is.
“I thought that planning interviews and questions gave us another look into not just what they’re telling us, but their life and how they lived it and not missing a bit of it,” he said. “Every detail was truly different than [that of] any other person.”
Noah said that the end product of the program is an added plus because it ensures that those who don’t have the same opportunity as he and his peers will still be able to hear directly from those who experienced the atrocities.
“Learning about the Holocaust is always good, but seeing it from a personal lens and having a primary source is really, really impactful to having in-depth learning,” he said. “The fact that people later won’t have this opportunity just [shows] even more how we need to take advantage of it now and document it so that people can experience it firsthand by what we recorded.”
Molly, a 12-year-old student at Kellman Brown, said that she and her fellow students understand the stakes at hand. She also said that the survivor that she got to know expressed an idea that has stuck with her since she heard it.
“We should still encourage learning about the Holocaust [because] survivors won’t be here much longer, and so maybe in two generations it’ll be up to [us] to make it meaningful,” she said. “The message I got from my survivor was not just that this terrible thing happened, but how to move forward and how to take advantage of the good times you do have, and just to be grateful.”
Noah said that the depth of their research showed the students so much about what existed before the Holocaust. Just as the name of the program said, the victims of this genocide were people, not tally marks.
“Getting to know a survivor and seeing it from a completely different lens and comparing [it with others] shows that instead of it having happened to six million Jews, it was really one Jew, six million times,” he said.