What started as a project for one student quickly turned into a labor of love for four of Clarissa Ngo’s creative writing pupils.

French educators are attending a Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century workshop today and tomorrow to learn about IWitness and using testimony in the classroom.

Jan Karskiwas recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for risking his life in order to alert the world about the Holocaust. He remembers meeting award-winning French documentarian Claude Lanzmann, who interviewed Karski for his film Shoah, a nine and a half-hour documentary about the Holocaust.

Growing up, it wasn’t terribly unusual to see people in our house with telltale tattoos on their arms. We kids somehow knew what those blurry inked numbers meant, but we also knew it wasn’t polite to ask about them. And so, I never did. And honestly, no one in my family had been so marked — the people with tattoos were mostly friends of my grandparents — so it wasn’t something I had a lot of interest in hearing about. And perhaps in an effort to protect our innocence, family elders showed no interest in talking about it.