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An independent day school educating students PreK-Grade 12

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Students Reflect on the Holocaust Through Personal Testimonies and Virtual Conversations
Upper School JSAG
Van Koten

Middle and upper school students gained a deeper understanding of the Holocaust this week, immersing themselves in firsthand accounts and engaging in meaningful discussions about the lives of Jewish and Gentile communities during this dark chapter in history. 

On Wednesday, January 29, students, faculty, and staff explored first-hand accounts of life during the Holocaust, gaining insight into the resilience and courage of those who endured its horrors.

In the Upper School, the Jewish Students Affinity Group (JSAG) invited students and faculty to a special presentation and Q&A session with art teacher Ran LaPolla and her mother, Willy van Koten, who shared the family's experience helping Jews during the Holocaust.

Van Koten, who grew up in a city in the Netherlands called Utrecht, described how her father, Willem van Diest, became involved with the resistance group Oranje Vrijbuiters during the Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1945.

Despite the life-threatening risk of being discovered, her father and mother, Anna van Diest, hid Jewish families in their home and worked to arrange for transport out of the Netherlands.

Medal

“They were very naive in a way,” recalled Koten. “It was only much later that we realized the enormous risk they had taken without knowing it because they were good people.”

LaPolla shared how her grandparents treated the Jews with compassion and humanity, inviting them to partake in their daily lives.

“When it was dinner time, they would invite them to the table to eat,” she said. “Everyone sat down at the same table and got the same food.”

Their actions were recognized posthumously in 1999 when Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, awarded them a medal and the honorary title “Righteous Amongst the Nations.”

In the Middle School, advisory groups participated in virtual conversations with AI-generated characters experiencing the onset of World War II. Teachers facilitated the discussions, asking questions from the class to two teenagers living in Nazi-occupied Poland: Anna, a 13-year-old Jewish girl, and Piotr, a 13-year-old Gentile boy – both generated using the AI program ChatGPT.

Middle School

English teacher Jordan Rochelson organized the activity to help students grasp the events of the Holocaust beyond numbers. 

“I have given and heard a lot of lessons about the Holocaust that are very rooted in facts and figures,” he said. “While those numbers are overwhelming and important, they are hard for an adolescent to truly grasp. I wanted them to understand what events like this are like on a personal, individual level.”

When asked to describe how her peers treated her before and after the Nazi occupation, Anna detailed how she was outcast and shunned at school. As students considered her story, they discussed the relationship between peer pressure and bullying and drew parallels to the segregation of Black Americans.

Both events at King followed International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday, January 27. 

Researching Jewish and Gentile perspectives underscored the importance of speaking out for human rights while taking action and helping the oppressed. Engaging with history in a personal way served as a powerful reminder that the past is not just a collection of facts but a series of lived experiences that continue to shape our world.

ChatGPT