FLAGS AT CENTER HONOR GENOCIDE VICTIMS
Dayna Straehley
The Press Enterprise (Riverside, CA.)
April 22, 2009, Wednesday
Genocide has eight stages, and Unity students from Corona high
schools are letting people know in an effort to keep something like
the Holocaust from happening again.
"My hope for this display is that it stops with Darfur," said Eliseo
Davalos, director of student services for Corona-Norco Unified School
District, who organized the event.
Students from the Unity classes at Santiago, Corona and Lee Pollard
high schools and from the leadership class at Orange Grove High School
planted 3,400 small flags Tuesday in front of the Corona Civic Center,
each one in memory of 5,000 genocide victims.
The flags were color coded for victims of the Holocaust carried out
by the Nazis from 1938 to 1945, including 6 million Jews, and for
victims of other genocides in the past 100 years.
The flag planting, on Yom Hashoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day,
culminates a unit of study about genocide, he said. Students will visit
the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles next week, said Orange Grove
counselor Lynda Bowie, who teaches that schools’ leadership class.
The students have learned that genocide has eight stages, Davalos said.
"It starts with classification," said Santiago senior Lesley Marin.
"When people start separating the people," such as Aryans and Jews,
added sophomore Cort Barton.
"It’s not just the Nazis," he said. "Every genocide classifies who
they are and why we’re better."
Symbolization is the next step, such as when the Nazis made the Jews
wear yellow Stars of David, Cort said. Or when the victims are given
a uniform to wear to identify them, added Santiago junior Justin Deal.
Dehumanization happens next, Cort said. In Rwanda, the genocide
victims were called cockroaches, he said.
Every genocide has to have organization, like Hitler’s S.S., Cort said.
Polarization – when the Nazis sent the Jews to ghettos, for example –
is the fifth stage, Lesley said.
Preparation, when the Nazis took the Jews to death camps and separated
those able to work from those unable, is the sixth stage, Barton said.
Extermination is the seventh stage and always is followed by denial,
the eighth.
"Basically, they say `it wasn’t our fault, they started it,’"
Deal said.
The flags will remain on the lawn until Friday afternoon, Davalos said.
Reach Dayna Straehley at 951-368-9455 or [email protected]
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GENOCIDES REMEMBERED
Flags at Corona’s Civic Center honor millions of victims of genocide.
Armenian: 1.5 million people killed, 1915-18,
Holocaust: More than 6 million people killed, 1938-45
Cambodian: 2 million people killed, 1975-79
Iraqi Kurds: 182,000 people killed, 1987-88
Bosnia: 200,000 people killed, 1992-95
Rwanda: 1 million people killed, April-July 1994
Darfur: 450,000 people killed, 2.5 million displaced, 2003-present