| 10 December 2007, Belleville, ON—In late November 46 students in Grades 10, 11 and 12 visited the Holocaust Centre in Toronto. While there, they toured the museum, viewed a film on the Holocaust and had the privilege of listening to the first-hand account of Holocaust survivor Edith Gelbard. In the course of an hour, Gelbard related that she survived as a hidden child for several years in France after her family fled her homeland in 1938, when the Nazis annexed Austria. The students were drawn into the story of her childhood; hiding first in Belgium and then fleeing to France in 1940, where Gelbard lost her father forever when he was discovered and arrested by the Nazis. At the end of World War II, after several years of hiding, the rest of the family was reunited in 1945 with the liberation and Gelbard immigrated to Canada in 1955. A question and answer period concluded this experience and the students were given the opportunity to speak with Gelbard one-on-one.
The students also had the chance to spend time in the exhibit, “Light One Candle: A Child’s Diary of the Holocaust,” which uses photographs as art and testimony to the value of a survivor’s accounts of his experiences. Based on the book of the same name by Solly Ganor, the art exhibit recreates the events in a diary that had to be disposed of during the war when writing in it became too dangerous. Both Gelbard’s story and the exhibit allowed the students to meet and study the life of someone that had actually experienced and survived a traumatic part of history, adding to their in classroom learning experience.
Centre Hastings Secondary School appreciates all the work that the Holocaust Centre does to add to our understanding of history.
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