Holocaust survivor to talk to students during conference
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Greater Lafayette students will have the chance to hear a man's firsthand account of what it was like to spend part of his childhood in a concentration camp when he tells his story during a conference later this month.Holocaust survivor and author Samuel Harris will talk during a student program, part of the 25th annual Greater Lafayette Holocaust Remembrance Conference, at 9:30 a.m. March 29 at Happy Hollow Elementary School in West Lafayette.
For the 10th year in a row, Purdue University's James F. Ackerman Center for Democratic Citizenship in the College of Education is sponsoring the student program. More than 150 students are expected to attend.
"The student program was developed to provide area students and teachers with age-appropriate educational experiences about the Holocaust," said Phillip J. VanFossen, director of the Ackerman Center. "Holocaust education is a clear case of learning from history in order to avoid repeating mistakes of the past.
"An important step in preventing a future occurrence of such atrocities is for current generations to learn the lessons of the Holocaust."
Harris, a resident of suburban Chicago, is president of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois. He was born in Poland as Szlamek Rzeznik, and was 4 when the Nazis invaded the country in 1939. As a child during World War II, he survived four years in the Deblin and Czestochowa concentration camps. He lost his parents and five of his brothers and sisters, who were killed in Treblinka death camp.
After the war, one of Harris's surviving sisters and her husband decided that he and another of his sisters should go United States to be adopted. He was later adopted by Ellis and Harriet Golden Harris and began a new life with them near Chicago.
Harris is the author of an autobiography, "Sammy: Child Survivor of the Holocaust." He graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa and is retired from the insurance industry.
The Ackerman Center supports Holocaust education as part of its overall mission of education for citizenship because an understanding of history is an important part of effective citizenship in a democracy, VanFossen said.
The center — which was created in 1994 with a $2 million gift from James Ackerman, an Indianapolis cable television executive, and his wife, Lois — also sponsors an annual Summer Institute on Citizenship Education for teachers, various workshops and civic education projects for teachers and students. It also serves as a statewide resource center for citizenship education materials.
Writer: Kim Medaris, (765) 494-6998, kmedaris@purdue.edu
Sources: Phillip VanFossen, (765) 494-2367, vanfoss@purdue.edu
Anatoli Rapoport, graduate research assistant, (765) 496-3029, rapoport@purdue.edu
Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu
Related news release:
Holocaust Remembrance Conference to begin March 26
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