Every year at Newark Christian School I have a theme for my students to follow through their studies. This year my theme was “What does it look like to love my neighbor?” We focused on this theme by studying wars through history, reading and field trips. Now, you might be asking how studying war could possibly have anything to do with loving your neighbor. War is a major conflict between peoples and nations. It usually stems out of sin and self-centeredness, pain, and injustice. We learn a lot about what not to do in our future based on what’s in our history. We learn how to love by studying how we have not loved in our past.
At the beginning of the school year, we studied World War II in depth for three months. I thought the students would be tired of it by the end of the unit, and would never want to talk about it again. However, long after we finished the course, our discussions continued to include pieces of our study of WWII. We gleaned countless lessons about loving others through this war. We learned that not all Germans were bad, not to follow others blindly or in fear, and the importance of standing up for our neighbors in need or facing persecution. We studied in depth all the different perspectives of people in the war, the world leaders themselves down to the innocent bystanders and the persecuted. We read stories such as The Diary of a Young Girl and Unbroken. Our lunchtime movie break included movies with characters from many different war perspectives like Woman in Gold, The Boy in Striped Pajamas, my Italian favorite Viva La Bella (Life is Beautiful), and The Book Thief. To add to our reading of the diary of Anne Frank, the eighth graders and I went to see a play based on the book; and we took a virtual tour of Anne’s hiding spot right from our classroom!
Two of my favorite field trips this year came out of our study of the Holocaust. At the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., our students began their journey by receiving a passport of a persecuted Jewish person filled with their personal journey during the War. Leslie Arias, an 8th grade student said, “It was the most touching part of the trip. In terms of memorable, [reading the passport] hit home for all of us.” They stared in awe and horror at the mountain of shoes that were taken away from the Jews at the camps. They walked through the train cars, barracks, and saw a model of the gas chambers. Stacy, one of my sixth grade girls told me, “The most memorable thing that touched me from the Holocaust Museum was the film that showed the piles upon piles of dead bodies.” Seeing the footage only further solidified the severity of the entire war.
Later in our school year, at the Morris Museum’s Survivor Speaks program, two Holocaust survivors told their stories. Stella from France, emigrated here to Newark when she arrived in America. Fred, from Germany, encouraged us to be UP-standers rather than bystanders. Afterwards, we all got to hug and talk personally with the two survivors. We appreciated seeing and hearing how their life stories were intertwined with our history class topics. It gave life to our own reflections about loving our neighbors and how history is made up of personal events. The actions of WWII, both good and bad, taught us about the value of loving our neighbors across the ocean and in our own neighborhoods.
