By ALEX COSTELLO
A member of the Five Towns JCC, Igileski, along with others, had come to talk to students during the school's annual Holocaust Remembrance Day program. The eighth-graders peppered him with questions about his experience, and he answered them all, piecing together his dramatic story of survival.
Igileski, now 82, was only 14 when he was carted off to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Having grown up in a Jewish ghetto in Brzeziny, near Lodz, Poland, he had known discrimination before. But what the Nazis did was something new.
"I'll tell you the good things and I'll tell you the bad things," Igileski said to the students. "Just the way it was."
Holocaust Remembrance Day follows eighth-graders' completion of a social studies unit about World War II and the Holocaust. They have also read about the Holocaust in their English classes.
"[Without] the background, listening to the stories, they're just stories," said Ronnie Dien, academic facilitator for language arts and an English teacher at the school. "They don't really know it."
The goal, Dien said, is for students to take away not just the Holocaust survivors' harrowing tales, but also lessons they can apply to their own lives. "We hope that what ties this unit together is that we want them to make good choices in life," she said. "What made some people be bystanders and let this horrible thing go on, and what made some other people take the step from being a bystander to being a rescuer?
"And if they see a friend of theirs that's being bullied," Dien continued, "are they going to be a bystander and watch it, or are they going to be a rescuer? This was really character education, as well as tying into history."
The students in the library appeared riveted by Igileski's account of his experiences. He told his audience how fellow prisoners at Auschwitz would fight one another to get food, and how a German doctor took pity on him and would sneak him a sandwich every day. He never learned the man's name, Igileski said, and to this day he wishes he could find him and thank him, because the food saved his life.
After he was liberated, he recounted, he had to go to a Red Cross station just to remember what camps he was in, because he was moved around often. "Maybe some things I've forgotten I refuse to remember," Igileski told the students.
One of the things he did remember, however, was how he managed to keep himself going every day: hope. "It was the only way you could survive," he said. "Hope that tomorrow would be different."
Igileski's stories were harrowing and poignant. He told students how, when a man died during the night, he took a piece of bread from under his pillow. He said that even though the man was dead, he felt guilty about stealing that bread - and he still feels that guilt today.
Principal Shelagh McGinn said that the effect on the students is evident. Each year, the school has asked the students to write letters to the speakers thanking them for coming. "One of the kids wrote something to the effect of, 'I know you lived through such prejudice,'" McGinn said. "'I see prejudice, too. And now I try to make a difference. Nothing I see is as horrific as what you had to go through, and I'm so grateful you came to share.'"
Rockville Centre resident Paul Keller, another survivor, was also invited to speak at the school. When he was 15, Keller's parents made him leave Germany, before the Nazis began rounding up Jews, sending him to America to live with his uncle, whom he had never met. "I talk to the students not about the camps, but about the people who managed to flee," Keller said. "The refugees."
Keller's story is one that students can relate to. He told them about attending a German high school and watching more and more of his friends showing up to class in Hitler Youth uniforms. "We couldn't go out and have fun, us Jewish kids, because we were afraid of getting beat up," Keller said. Then he spoke of going to school in America, and the anxiety that came with being a stranger to everyone.
"It's good that we have the opportunity for these kids to experience [these stories] directly," said Superintendent Dr. William Johnson. Dien agreed, saying that this generation of students at South Side would be the last to benefit from meeting the Holocaust survivors and hearing their stories firsthand.
"At the end of the day, when you hear kids talking about who they heard and what they experienced, you know it makes an impact," Dien said. "They'll say it to me because I'm their teacher and they think that's what I want to hear. But when they talk to each other about it, I know it's had an impact."
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