Lake Stevens students write children's books that evoke themes of Holocaust
By Kaitlin Manry Herald Writer
LAKE STEVENS -- At the hands of the Nazis, Cyla Wiener was torn from her family, starved and stripped of her possessions.
The Nazis sent her 2-year-old son, Leo, and scores of other children out of the Kraków ghetto to what they called "a better place." Instead, the children were gassed to death at the Auschwitz concentration camp.
After the war, Wiener reunited with her husband and eventually moved to the U.S.
Touched by her story and amazed at all she lived through, Cavelero Mid High students Hailey Warren and Mattie Quigley wrote a children's book about her life. Now they're mailing "The Adventures of Bunny the Rabbit" to a Holocaust survivors network that has promised to try to give the book to Wiener or her family.
Like other ninth-graders in Linda Fredin's advanced English classes, they faced the difficult task of transforming a Holocaust survivor's story into a book parents could read to their kindergartners before bed. Fredin asked her students to use symbolism to make tragic stories more palatable to kids.
Hailey and Mattie recast Wiener's story to focus on a bunny who was tricked into going to a pet shop, which represents a concentration camp. The girls struggled deciding how to portray Wiener's son. They thought it would be too gruesome to have the bunny's child die in the book, so they decided to use a favorite carrot to symbolize Leo.
"It was hard to sugarcoat everything for a child and it was especially hard for me to tell the reader that when Bunny, the character that portrayed you, didn't find her carrot, which represented your son, she still live (sic) happily ever after," Mattie wrote in a letter to Wiener. "I know you still think of him often."
During a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Fredin was inspired by a children's book about how the creators of "Curious George" escaped the Holocaust. "The Journey that Saved Curious George," by Louise Borden, tells the story of how Hans and Margret Rey fled the Nazis on bicycles with their children's book manuscript. The book is aimed at elementary and middle school students.
Fredin had 21 of the best books made by her students professionally bound, and she plans to send them to the survivors network this week. Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The students researched Holocaust survivors online at the Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive and selected a survivor with whom they felt a connection. Many students chose survivors who were teenagers during the Holocaust.
"Because they were our age, we were able to identify more with them and think about what it would be like if our families were taken away," student Alyssa Grisham said. "It was more than just statistics."
In the letters they wrote to their survivors, many students discussed how the research made a distant tragedy real. They asked their survivors to write back and share their thoughts on the books.
"At the beginning of the project, I was only writing the story so that I would get a good grade, but as it progressed I began to work on it because I wanted to contribute to the remembrance of Jews in the Holocaust," Megan Pryor wrote to her survivor. "I know that I could never understand everything you went through because nothing like it has ever happened to me, but I do appreciate being able to learn about your history so that I can do everything possible to prevent this in the future."
