A Lesson in Horror
Catholic School Teacher From  Edmond Makes Her Way to
Auschwitz To Help World Remember 'Never Again'
Joan Krauss stands at the front gate of Auschwitz. The sign reads, "Work Makes You Free."

By Eileen Dugan
The Sooner Catholic

Joan Krauss, a sixth-grade teacher at Saint Elizabeth Seton School in Edmond, returned recently from a six-day trip to Poland. She was one of 45 U.S. Catholic school teachers who participated in the March of the Living, memorial exercises honoring those who died in the Holocaust during World War II. In Poland, Krauss also attended other observances for the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in Europe.

Krauss and more than 18,000 others from around the world came together to discuss and remember the atrocities committed at the Nazi death camps during World War II. On May 5, Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day, she and the other March of the Living participants marched at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp.

Abraham Hirchson, March of the Living founder and member of the Israeli Knesset [Israel’s parliament], has written that the “Holocaust is not only a Jewish issue” but a  “universal” one. He hopes that all who attend March of the Living events will “learn from the past so that a more humane, tolerant, and just society may evolve for the benefit of all.”

“Since this year is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, this March for the Living is especially meaningful,” Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and one of the sponsors of the Bearing Witness program, said. “It’s important for Catholic school teachers to educate their students about the Holocaust since many of the survivors are dying and there are still those that deny the Holocaust happened.”

This year’s march drew delegates, including Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon and Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski, from more than 60 countries.

To prepare for her trip, Krauss participated in the Bearing Witness program held last summer in Washington, D.C. Entitled “Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Contemporary Issues,” this series of events was part of the seventh National Summer Institute for Catholic School Educators.

Since its inception in 1996, the purpose of Bearing Witness has been to “focus on the history of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, addressing issues of diversity, prejudice, and bigotry in contemporary society, and to teach these topics in a Catholic school setting.”  To date, approximately 340 teachers have participated in this national program.

Sponsors of Bearing Witness include the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Catholic Educational Association, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Brochures for the institute state, “participants will be better prepared to develop in their students a respect for the dignity of the human person, no matter their color, nationality, race, or religion....This follows the Seven Principles of Catholic Social Teaching: that all human life is sacred.”

Krauss flew to Poland on El Al, the Israeli airline. “This trip was physically, emotionally, and spiritually profound. I’m still processing everything,” Krauss said.

 “Our flight consisted of Bearing Witness people and other Jewish groups from the U.S. traveling with the Anti-Defamation League. On the flight we had kosher food.”

Their flight left New York on Tuesday, May 3, and landed early Wednesday morning in Krakow, Poland. “There were guards with machine guns guarding the airport as we disembarked El Al,” Krauss said. “We were divided into three different buses and driven to an area in Krakow where we saw where some Jewish survivors had been hidden by Christian families. Security was tight.”              
 The next day, May 5th, “we received blue badges, jackets, and back packs for the March of the Living. All 18,000 of us were pretty easy to identify. We arrived at Auschwitz and began to line up. There were so many people we couldn’t see the end of the line. It seemed appropriate that it was a crummy day, raining.

“We were each given unlit candles that we could leave wherever we chose. At each area of Auschwitz we visited, we would leave a burning candle or stop and say some prayers. Those who had lost family members would say their families’ names.

“We went by cell block 10 where they used prisoners as human guinea pigs for gruesome experiments like sterilization. The Death Wall was between cell block 10 and 11 [where prisoners were shot to death.] Different groups left flowers there. Some German political leaders left a wreath for Remembrance and had a Forgiveness service in German and Polish.

“In my classroom, we have two classroom saints. One is Father Maximilian Kolbe. We saw where he was held in a cell block 11,” Krauss said. Father Kolbe was canonized a saint by John Paul II. The priest volunteered to die in the place of another prisoner at Auschwitz, a young husband and father, who was to be executed as punishment for a prisoner’s escape.

Later, the marchers passed the crematorium and came to an open field. The ashes of thousands who had been killed at Auschwitz still remain there.

It is a Jewish custom to place small stones on the top of a grave’s headstone in memory of the person who has died. Krauss had brought several stones with her from home for this purpose.

 “I placed my stones on a memorial headstone near a lake at Auschwitz where there are human ashes. I thought this was an appropriate place to leave them,” she said. “The memorial reads, ‘To the memory of the men, women, and children who fell victim to the Nazi genocide. Here lie their ashes. May their souls rest in peace.’

“After the March, we Bearing Witness people had our own service. Different teachers were invited to speak, to give their thoughts. One teacher from Bishop Mullen High School in Denver is Jewish. She read a poem she had written on the back of her program as we had marched through Auschwitz. Her grandparents had been killed at another concentration camp. We all cried as we listened.

“This was the 18th March of the Living. We had 18,000 people. Someone told me that the character for the number ‘eighteen’ in Hebrew also means ‘Hope’,” Krauss said. She saw this as a good sign.

In that regard, she continued, “We were asked to write messages of hope on wooden paddles about a foot long, given to us after the March. Most of us did. Many people left these messages along the railroad tracks leading to Auschwitz. I left mine there.”

Krauss and the other participants of the March of the Living and the Bearing Witness program pray that their efforts and those of others will help bring about a more hopeful and tolerant world in which nothing like the Holocaust ever happens again.

On May 8, Pope Benedict XVI said he believed Roman Catholics and Jews would continue their dialogue and could look with “confidence” to the future. The pope’s comments were in the form of a note to Elio Toaff, former chief rabbi of Rome, on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Rabbi Toaff had greeted Pope John Paul II when he made his historic visit to Rome’s synagogue in 1986. John Paul was the first pontiff to visit a synagogue and the first to visit Israel.

When Krauss returned from Poland, she shared her experiences with her sixth graders. She will develop a curriculum on anti-Semitism and Holocaust to be presented this fall.