Blended Poetry Based on The Cage

We read The Cage by Ruth Minsky Sender.  When we finished that book, the students highlighted passages that really spoke to them and then answered a few prompts of their own.  They then took those highlighted portions of Sender's work and mixed them with their own answers to the prompts, creating a blended poem.  These are a few really good ones, though they all turned out spectacular!

"It is Good" by Brooke and Ruth Sender

It is good to be alive

    With hopes of a bright future

I must never again give up

    My family is counting on me

I want to take everything with me

    All those precious moments

I must carry them in my heart

     the sights, the sounds, the laughter

We still dream

     a family, a husband

A life almost forgotten

     with old hopes comes new

Hands reach out,

     to grasp that old life

I want to shout for Joy!

     memories never fade.

"Hope" by Snezhanna and Ruth Sender

It is good to be alive

     God and my religion keep me going.

Beauty and horror around me.

     I want to be happy.

I must never again give up.

      My friend helped me get through so much.

I am going to write again.

     Writing stories keeps me sane.

A world of poetry, beauty, and hope

     My dreams are an inspiration, giving me hope for a better day.

"Memory" by Elliott and Ruth Sender

A gentle breeze caresses my face

     A feeling that my mother is right there beside me.

A world of love

     The future with my own family

I must never give up

     Guidance from my dad in the right direction

Dream of a better world

     I hope to one day help others in need

I must carry them in my heart

     The memories with my cousins

A tomorrow that is coming for all of us

     A future of happiness

It is good to be alive

     The advantage to travel to a beautiful place to live in my memory

Every detail.

"He's Always Listening" by Ashley and Ruth Sender

He listens with interest to my every word

     God, He's always listening

I speak to Him of a tomorrow

     to become a teacher, to have a nice home

Forgetting death knocking at our door, we still dream

     to get married, to have kids

How lovely it must be to run freely among such surroundings

     Disneyworld, Childhood fun

Hands reach out to touch him

     God, He's always listening

He listens with interest to my every word. 

"Life" by Emily and Ruth Sender

A gentle breeze coming through the window caresses my face.

     Married happily and with a healthy family.

It is good to be alive.

     Jesus, my Savior, who has given me a life to live.

They all left traces of their lives here

     At the table on Sundays after church during lunch.

Set amid majestic mountains.  Such beauty.

     The view of the sunset from my porch falling behind the ridge of mountains.

Like a prince in a fairy tale,

     large grassy yard to freely play in.

Beauty and horror all around me,

     Mom's and dad's encouraging inspirational words surround me.

Rescue and Resistance

Reflect on the following statement from the Talmud: 

 "He who saves one life, it's as though he has preserved the existence of the entire world."

Week of April 27

I know it has bothered us a little not having a defined schedule, but I think it was worth it to get to hear Sonja, right?  This week we will get back on track.  I am giving you ONE day this week to FINISH your artistic projects.  That's it.  They will be graded on May 4.  If you will have more to do, it will have to be done outside of class.  OK?

Monday, April 27

Seminar, activity over The Cage

Tuesday, April 28 

Resistance

Wednesday, April 29

Finish artistic projects

DUE:  Journal response

Thursday, April 30

Liberation and rescue

Friday, May 1

Liberation

"Escape from Sobibor"

“Most people only dream their nightmares. However, I and my fellow survivors actually lived this experience,” said Philip Bialowitz, one of only seven remaining survivors of the Nazi extermination camp, Sobibor, where an estimated 250,000 Jews, including most of his family, were murdered. “We fought hard for our dignity and our lives. The inhumanity of the Nazis knew no limits.”

“Shema” by Primo Levi

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labors in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when
you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease renders you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.



Here is a link to a website about Philip Bialowitz where I got this information. Any response to his story, the movie, the poem?

Your Cause

In the English II Honors class, Sonja DuBois challenged them to pick one cause to devote their time, energy, and resources to. As you age, there will be lots of requests and demands of you for social causes and charities. One lesson of the Holocaust is that "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." (Edmund Burke) We are responsible, throughout our lives, as citizens of a democracy, of a society, for doing our best to correct injustices around us. Too often we do one of two things: we either ignore these problems or we try to give a little to everything to ease our guilty consciences. As Sonja so eloquently pointed out, imagine if each person chose ONE cause and devoted him or herself to it for life?

Obviously my passion is respect for your fellow man. I have devoted myself as an educator to a study of the Holocaust in the hope of educating those around me about making the world a safer place. I feel that every human being deserves respect. As far as my "cause", beyond being a Holocaust educator, I am committed to a ministry for abused and neglected children called Royal Family Ministries. My church does a camp every summer for nearly forty children in the foster care systems of Bradley, Hamilton, and McMinn counties. I have served as a counselor at that camp almost every year since its inception in 1999. This is our tenth year for Royal Family Kids Camp, and we have expanded that ministry to include a middle school retreat about five years ago. I serve on the Royal Family board at my church, Kraig and I are both counselors, and we have chosen to make this ministry the source of our financial support. You know that I try not to ask you to do anything I would not/am not doing, so I wanted to answer the question that follows before I asked you to.

My question to you is, what is your cause going to be? What are you passionate about? What do you see as something that merits your time, energy, and resources? Or are YOU going to stand by and do nothing?

What Did You Think?

Pictures to Come!
You all had an opportunity on Thursday to do something that very few people in your generation have gotten to do, and fewer and fewer people in the future will do. You (Holocaust Lit and English II) got to hear the story of Sonja DuBois, a survivor of the Holocaust. I really don't want to post a bunch of questions on here or put words in your mouths. I mainly want to hear your response to her story.

I will tell you that I was so interested in what she said about the moment that she decided to start sharing her story with others was when she saw the Bible study about Esther and realized that she, too, lived a double life. And just like Esther, there were lots of people involved in saving Sonja. I, as a parent, cannot imagine what her parents must have felt when they left her at the station, her mother who put the necklace around her neck, and then walked away. Even if I KNEW, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Emma and Kelsey would be safer left behind (and her parents didn't KNOW), I cannot fathom what it would feel like to put them in the arms of a stranger to them and walk away, not knowing what would become of them. The pain they must have suffered at that moment probably hurt so much more than the death they encountered later. I also was staggered by how much we take for granted with our own lives, in that we all have people who can tell our life stories, who we look like, act like, and so on. She has no one in her life who can do that for her.

I said I wasn't going to put words in your mouths and I guess I did. I could probably write forever about my response to her story and the feelings it stirred in me. She was so arresting, such a powerful speaker, yet so approachable. But now, the responsibility lies with you and me. We are among the few people who have heard first hand the story of a Holocaust survivor. What, now, will we do with it? Sonja's story lives on with us. Her parents live on in us, because we know the sacrifice they made so that she could live to tell. It is your duty, your obligation, to bear witness when the time comes that no one is alive to say, "I was there. It happened to my family. I saw the camps. I lived it." YOU will have to stand up and say, "I heard the story of a survivor. I saw the necklace her mother left her, saw the one surviving photograph of her parents." It did happen, and we have to make sure that the lessons learned are applied to our daily lives.

I guess that's my sermon for the day.

Week of April 20

Wow, you guys are going to have such a special week. I am so anxious for you to hear Sonja this week. It is going to be something to remember.

Monday, April 20
Hidden Children lesson

Tuesday, April 21
Special guest, Sonja DuBois

Wednesday, April 22
Resistance

Thursday, April 23
Poems, anthology
"Escape from Sobibor"

Friday, April 24
"Escape from Sobibor"

Week of April 14

I have to say, I am probably the most impressed with you all this week than I have been all semester.  Your artistic Remembrance projects are seriously amazing.  You had awesome ideas, you actually made them happen, and at the end, you started to work well together and pull it off!  I can't wait to see the finished projects.

Tuesday, April 14

Watch "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas"

Wednesday, April 15

Finish "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas"

Thursday, April 16

Work day

Friday, April 17

Children Lesson

Ecphrastic Poetry Extended Project

After writing an ecphrastic poem in response to the photo of the Little Polish Boy, the students were given an assignment of finding a work, whether a photograph, painting, sculpture, monument, song, or book, and writing an ecphrastic poem based on that. There were some really great ones but the three I included were three that I could easily find the work to portray with it.

America is Too Strong by Ashley
Our nation as a whole, so strong and so bright
It was crushed to the ground by two simple flights

The losses they caused and all the sadness we shared
America is still great even though we were all scared

What wold we do, how will we take a stand
America is our big, beautiful, and bright land

We will stand strong and not let them see
The hurt, pain, and agony that left us to be

We are Americans, known to never give up
The damage that's done is not worth a million bucks

Great innocent lives were lost forever
But their memories will be here and gone never

A beautiful light stands on Ground Zero
You all are truly every American's hero

We will all still stand big and tall for our survivors and ones we lost
This is living proof to see this beautiful cross.

You Showed Us Reality by Laura
Does the world stand still in this moment?
As your flesh was torn from your bones?
As your blood curdling screams filled the air,
Did anyone hear you?
Or did they turn their heads the other way?
In this hour, no one moves, no one speaks, not a creature rushes to your side.
For you are marked as dead. I know you aren't, but child, it doesn't matter...
The famine has claimed you,
In its eager arms, I see it pulls you near,
It has promised to hold onto you.
As inhumanity's bells ring clear,
I see your woeful fate draw near.

Man Sitting Alone by Paulina
It's late
Maybe it's early

A man just walked in with his date
They must be tired, surely

They talk about what they have done
They talk about what they will do

The lights above them shine like the sun
The man behind the bar says it is two

I have no one to talk about the time with
No one to talk about the past

She left June fifth
Of the year last

Now I sit here along
At the restaurant where we met

Now my heart turns to stone
I haven't forgotten her yet

How she used to order a sundae
Every Friday

How she would giggle
At all my jokes

How her little finger used to wiggle
How she wouldn't eat her egg yokes

Her voice was soft and sweet
Like tiny silver bells

There was no stranger she wouldn't greet
No one she wouldn't wish well

She had no faults
She glowed like the morning dawn

I was like an empty vault
Cold like the morning dew on a lawn

Afraid to tell her how much I loved her
Masking my true emotion

Like a cur
I hid my devotion

Now all I can do is wait
Here with all my woes

I hope for the kindness of fate
I miss her from my head to my toes

I sit here waiting for her to come back
I'll wait here for her every day

I'll make up for all I lack
I'll wait until in my grave I lay

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Week of April 6

Different kind of week next week. After discussing our plans for Remembrance Day, I am still unsure. I don't want to plan something just for the sake of planning it, but I really do want to have some specific recognition of the memory of the Holocaust. Regarding our artistic responses, however, I am excited. The garden (which I will be honest, I was not expecting to progress and now I am half-thinking that it might be completed!) sounds amazing, the website is such an incredible idea, and the montage/collage is something that I would love to work on myself. The only thing I am still unsure of is the bench. I have looked at some over the weekend and I am just not sure what we could get that would hold up well outside. I don't know. I really thought that a bookcase would be awesome. I also went to some antique stores this weekend and got kind of interested in something like a trunk that could be painted, put on wheels, then used to store some of my Holocaust resources. We can talk more tomorrow about this. OK? I'm excited about it!

Morally Outraged?

I wasn't originally planning to post any more about "Europa, Europa," but I was interested in how differently this class seemed to feel than some of my class members last year. Perel "became" "racially pure", not just "racially pure", but actually a German soldier and then a member of the Hitler Youth, in this movie. Most of you seemed to view this as admirable, a triumph of sorts because he "outsmarted" the Nazis. Some in the past have been almost morally outraged at his decision, and have viewed it as a betrayal of his people and his brothers. I would venture to guess that Holocaust survivors who have viewed this movie also have varying opinions on the topic. For the sake of argument, I just wondered if there was anyone who did not speak up in class on the opposing side but would like to do so on here. If this post speaks to anyone, I am very curious to hear your opinions.

No Academy Award

"Europa, Europa" won a Golden Globe Award from LA Film Critics. However, the German film committee decided not to nominate it for an Academy Award. The response in Germany to this film was, for the most part, negative. Some called the main character "opportunistic and cynical," while others questioned his morality. What is your reaction to the denial for this film to be eligible for an Academy Award by its own county's film critics?