New Milford Teacher Aids Effort To Build Holocaust Memoria

NEW MILFORD TEACHER AIDS EFFORT TO BUILD HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL
By Ashley Kindergan

NorthJersey.com
Tuesday, February 2, 2010

NEW MILFORD – High-school teacher Colleen Tambuscio and her students
had all read the diary of Jewish teenager Otto Wolf before visiting
the forest hideaways in the Czech Republic where his family hid for
two years from the Nazis during World War II.

They were shocked to find the that dugouts still existed but without
a corresponding memorial of the family’s struggles or mention of the
non-Jewish Czechs who helped the Wolfs survive.

"I said, ‘Who knows this is here?’" Tambuscio said. "There’s nothing
to tell people what this is."

Tambuscio, who teaches a class on the Holocaust and genocide at New
Milford High School, is now working with the mayor of the Czech village
of Trsice, Leona Stejsksalova; a local Holocaust survivor; and members
of the Jewish community in nearby Olomouc to build memorials in the
forest and the village itself.

Private donors who help fund a trip every year for students from
New Milford, Jersey City and Kansas to the Czech Republic, Germany
and Poland, will also be asked this year for help with the $11,000
memorial project.

The project is expected to be completed by spring of 2011.

The Wolf family lived in the woods outside Trsice, taking shelter
in winter in the sheds of non-Jewish Czechs, who also provided food
for the family, from the summer of 1942 until April 1944. The family
later lived in an attic and a barn owned by sympathetic hosts.

The rest of the family survived, but Otto was killed shortly before
the end of the war in a roundup by the German secret police, along
with non-Jewish Czechs. The rest of the family survived, and his
sister eventually gave his diary to the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

The museum’s chief conservator, Jane Klinger, said Wolf’s diary and
others like it are critical to research on the Holocaust.

"Diaries in general are extremely important for the scholarship of the
Holocaust because they’re eyewitness accounts," Klinger said. "[Otto]
tried to write every day. It really cannot be looked at as a piece of
literature in the way Anne Frank’s diary has been. It’s much more dry;
it’s much more concerned with survival."

Tambuscio’s interactive teaching is nothing new for her or her
students. As a regional education coordinator for the Holocaust Museum
and the founder of the Council of Holocaust Educators, she is at the
top of a growing field of educators interested in teaching genocide.

"Colleen … is without question one of the leaders in the field of
Holocaust education in the country, and absolutely in the state of
New Jersey," said Daniel Napolitano, director of education at the
Holocaust Museum.

The message to take action spreads to her students. Last year,
students volunteered to clean up debris and trash where Plaszow, the
concentration camp near Krakow, Poland, from which Oskar Schindler
plucked the Jewish workers for his famous enamelware factory,
once stood.

"It shouldn’t be a forgotten concentration camp," said Meredith McCann,
a senior this year who was on the trip. "It was very upsetting for
us to go see that."

In the end, Tambuscio said, taking action is what the class is
all about.

On the first day of Tambuscio’s semester class this week, students
watched and discussed a "60 Minutes" TV story about a teenager who
failed to stop a friend who assaulted and murdered a 7-year-old girl.

In the weeks that follow, students will learn about the Armenian
genocide and conflicts in Rwanda and the Darfur region of Sudan.

"The class gives them the language to speak out," Tambuscio said.

"When you see things in society that are marginalizing groups of
people, what the potential for that marginalization can be."

Email: kindergan@northjersey.com