“100 Days to Inspire Respect” Week 13: Building Resilience
Students watch testimony of survivors who share stories of resilience, the challenges they faced and how resilience took many forms. Students consider their own resilience and its role in wellbeing.
Remembering Holocaust Survivor Helen Colin on Her Birthday
Colin is thought to have the distinction of being the first survivor to speak on camera, just after liberation from Bergen-Belsen, which happened to be her 22nd birthday.
Last summer, I watched the disturbingly iconic reel of black-and-white footage that revealed the shameful truth of Bergen-Belsen.
The grainy footage, which many of us have seen, was taken at the concentration camp in Germany, a few days after the liberation on April 15, 1945. It offered one of the first glimpses into the hell that was the Holocaust. Under the armed command of liberators from the British Army, SS men are seen unloading the skeletal corpses of the Jews they’d murdered from the back of a pickup truck, and carrying them to a mass grave.