Coral Park High School students learn about the Holocaust directly from survivors

There’s never a bad time to learn from Holocaust survivors, but one could argue that right now, with antisemitism soaring worldwide, might be the best time. 

The opportunity fell into the laps of students at Coral Park Senior High School. As part of a nationwide project called “Names Not Numbers,” students were able to interview five Holocaust survivors about their experiences before, during, and after World War II. Those interviews were turned into a 90-minute documentary, which featured testimony like this from survivor Allan Hall. 

“The people begging and screaming and crying as their children were being ripped away from them,” Hall recounted before a picture of children in a penned-in area is shown on the screen. “I am relatively certain that I am the only one of all those children who survived.”

It’s called “Names Not Numbers” to remind everyone that the 6 million Jews and 5 million so-called undesirables murdered by the Nazis were individuals, people just like the five survivors the kids interviewed. 

“To actually meet somebody who went through it, is very emotional,” said Esther Sandoval, a senior. 

“Just imagining that my family or anyone could go through something horrific like that is really heartbreaking,” added Mariarosa Naves, also a senior at the school. 

The students asked the questions and filmed the interviews. As teaching moments go, you can’t ask for more. 

“The fact that they get to speak with someone who was there, a first-person view of that, is immeasurable,” said Holocaust Studies teacher Frank Sanchez. 

The reactions from his students show the impact the project has had. 

“It’s just like wow, like this person, they’ve gone through a lot and it changed my perspective on it a lot because I didn’t really pay attention to it that much,” said Mia Diaz, an 11th grader. 

“I mean it’s greatly impacted me, emotion-wise, because we truly understand what these people had to go through and it’s very sad,” Mariarosa said.

So yes, of course the students learned from people who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust, and one of the things they take away from this is the incredible optimism and hope that the survivors have to this day.

“And I don’t live my life in a pessimistic way, I’m very optimistic, I live life to the fullest,” one of the survivors says in the documentary.

But the survivors, and the students, are concerned about rising levels of antisemitic hate. 

“I learned that it’s really easy for these events to happen again because they’ve happened so many times throughout history,” said Dayanara Carvajal, another student from the Holocaust Studies class. 

She is, unfortunately, correct. Even since the Holocaust, there have been genocides, in Rwanda and Cambodia. 

“Do not tolerate any discrimination of any form, whether it’s religious-based or race-based or anything like that, speak up against it because only that way will we have a society that’s worth living in,” one of the survivors says at the end of the film.

That’s their primary message, to be an upstander rather than a bystander, because Holocaust survivors know, perhaps more viscerally than anyone else, where unchecked hatred and bigotry can lead.