“I heard about it through a tweet… how did you hear about it?” is a text message I sent to a group of seven other senior girls. How did eight individuals, each highly involved in the school, hear about an assembly given by a Holocaust survivor by a tweet, broadcasted by the handle @BernardsHS, after the assembly was given?
I was scrolling through my Twitter feed, like any other Tuesday night, as one might call procrastinating, but rather I call it educating myself on the days affairs, when I came across a tweet by @BernardsHS, “Thank you to Marsha Kreuzman for her sharing her powerful story of surviving the Holocaust with our freshmen today.” Also in the tweet was a link to an interview of Kreuzman on the NBC Nightly News. So instinctively, I clicked on the link and pressed ‘play’.
On the screen was almost 90 year old Kreuzman, being interviewed by Rhema Ellis about meeting her liberator almost 70 years after the fact. This lady, who spent five years in concentration camps, was sitting on Bernards High School’s PAC stage hours ago, yet many upperclassmen did not know; rather perhaps only limited staff members and freshmen knew as they were the ones sitting in the audience listening to this woman recall her memories from inside the concentration camps and how it shaped her life after being liberated.
Many who attended the assembly organized by Mrs. O’Brien and Freshman Taylor Kahn, were emotionally moved, especially after reading the novel Night, by Elie Wiesel, in their English I classes.
Mr. Neigel said “the assembly was limited to freshmen because the topic was closely aligned to their current curriculum in English Language Arts where they were reading or had read Night.”
Freshman McKinney Tropea said, “it was inspiring how [Kreuzman] was able to learn and grow after such a devastating experience.”
Although Bernards was fortunate for Kreuzman to accept their invitation to speak at the school, it is unfortunate that the entire school was not invited to hear her speak. It is highly understandable that with all the snow days the district has had, it is hard to take away more instruction time, but the administration could have better communicated with the students and staff and made the assembly open for everyone. It could have been up to the teacher’s discretion whether class time could be missed. I believe that many teachers would have made an exception to missed instruction time for Ms. Kreuzman. Likewise, many students – including myself – had study hall eighth period when the freshman were in the PAC. I, like many others, would have gladly given up the 42 minutes we had for ourselves for Ms. Kreuzman.
It is unfortunate that the majority of the school missed this opportunity to hear a primary source talk about the horrors of her experiences some 70 years ago. As a school, we pride ourselves on social awareness, and I believe the entire school would have been likely as moved as the freshmen were. We have all learned about the horrors of the Holocaust and hearing Marsha Kreuzman’s accounts would have been an amazing opportunity that the sophomores, juniors, and seniors have now not had.
