Genocide survivors speak at CHS History Symposium
By JESSICA CARR , Daily Times Staff Reporter 05/21/2004

Kent County Daily Times, RI
May 21 2004

WASHINGTON VILLAGE — The auditorium at Coventry High School became
a narrative museum yesterday afternoon when three guest speakers
discussed the horrors of all three genocides of the 20th century
with students from CHS and five surrounding school districts for the
school’s History Symposium.

Moushegh Derderian, one of the last living survivors of the Armenian
Genocide, Alice Golstein, a Jewish woman who, along with her family,
experienced first hand all of the devastations that led up to the
Holocaust, and Loung Ung, a noted speaker on Cambodia, child soldiers,
women and war, refugee issues, domestic violence and land mines were
the three featured guests at the event.

Derderian, now in his 90s, was born in Sepastia, Turkey, which
occupied Armenia in 1911.He made his long and arduous journey to
America in 1920, shortly after the Ottoman Turkish government put up
arms against the Armenians. Derderian discussed with students many
of the brutalities that he experienced during the Armenian Genocide.

Golstein, born in the back forest of Germany at the beginning of
the Nazi era, was raised at a time when the value of all people and
a sense of justice had not yet become equally apparent. Now, as a
historian and senior researcher at Brown University, Golstein uses
her deeply-rooted tragic childhood as the basis for her current life
as an active member of Rhode Island’s Jewish community.

Loung Ung, one of the lucky few to survive one of the bloodiest eras
in the 20th century, is now a renowned speaker on the killing fields
of Cambodia that she and her family had to fight their way through.
Just five years after her birth in 1970, Ung and her family were
forced from there home in a mass evacuation. During her presentation,
Ung detailed for the students in the audience the injustice that
brought her father, mother and sister to an early death.

“My sister died from starvation at 14 years old,” Ung said. “For fear
of my own death, I ate charcoal and pretended it was cake. My sister
was only one out of nearly two million that were killed during this
time. There were so many deaths that families just dug holes under
their homes and pushed the bodies under.”

Ung also told the audience about the 20,000 mass graves that were
filled to the brim with hundreds of bodies, which had been killed by
a blunt instrument to the back of the head.

“I had dreamed that the soldiers that came to get my father would
have used a bullet to kill him rather than the blunt object because
I knew it would have been quicker and less painful,” Ung said.

Above all else, one of the biggest eye opening aspects of Ung’s
discussion, the students in the audience said, was her talk about the
gardens of death, the killing fields, the acres and acres of unusable
soil that stretch across all of Cambodia still because of all of the
land mines that are buried under the soil.

All three of these speakers and the entire day’s activities were made
possible by Mackenzie Zabbo and Nicole St. Jean, two seniors at CHS
working to complete the project requirements of the Certificate of
Initial Mastery (CIM) voluntary senior project.

“I was expecting a tragedy like the screen wasn’t going to be here
for us to use or the projector and the lights weren’t going to work,
but I think everything ended up turning out pretty well,” said Zabbo.
“All of the kids seemed to like all of the speakers and I really
learned a lot from them. There is only so much you can learn in the
classroom, but when we heard each of the individual survivors stories,
it just made so much more of an impression.”

With the help of their senior advisor, Matt Brissette, Zabbo and St.
Jean had been working to coordinate the History Symposium Day since
the beginning of the year.

“We read the book (First They Killed My Father: a Cambodian Daughter
Remembers, by Loung Ung) last year in Mr. Brissette’s class and I
just loved it, so when he suggested that we get her to come I was
just so excited about that,” Zabbo said.

“Then he suggested that we incorporate all three of the genocides
into one big event and make it the school’s first History Symposium
Day,” St. Jean said. “So that is what we did. It was a lot of work,
but I really learned a lot and enjoyed every part of it, especially
hearing the individual survivors’ stories.”

According to Brissette, seeing that this year’s History Symposium Day
was such a tremendous success, it is something that he would like to
make a permanent fixture in the school’s yearly agenda.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress