Seneca Valley students meet with Holocaust survivor
JACKSON TWP — Seneca Valley High School history students got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to speak with a Holocaust survivor who lived through the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
A group of 38 juniors and seniors from Jim Lucot's AP government and honor U.S. history classes had a private meeting with Howard Chandler of Toronto. Chandler was in his teens when he was forced into labor by the Nazis and later sent to Auschwitz.
“They're the last generation that'll ever be able to discuss Auschwitz or the camp system or death marches or liberation,” Lucot said. “The rest of the survivors today will have been children and a lot of them don't remember anything.”
Chandler was visiting Pittsburgh for a week, and Lucot was able to secure an afternoon meeting with him during Chandler's busy stay in the area.
Students traveled to the Rodef Shalom Congregation in Shadyside Dec. 10 to hear him speak about his experiences during World War II and his life after.
They were also able to ask Chandler questions.
Hedy Chandler, his daughter and manager, said her father speaks to student groups several times a year in Toronto and abroad. While in Pittsburgh, he spoke to two school groups a day reaching thousands of students, she said.
Maggie Wallowicz, a Seneca Valley senior, said this is the only time she's been able to meet a Holocaust survivor. She noted how Chandler was not angry or vengeful after the traumatic experiences he went through.
“He was really amazing,” she said. “I think for me the most interesting thing was seeing how he reacted. He was so nice and happy. We talked about all these unimaginable things, but he was never fazed by it.
“He was really trying to promote love.”
Chandler was 10 years old and living in Poland when the Nazis invaded. He was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in his teens and later marched to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, Lucot said. He was finally liberated by the Russians at the Theresienstadt camp in Czech Republic in 1945.
Although he and his older brother survived the Holocaust, Chandler's father, mother, sister and another brother did not.Chandler has traveled back to Poland six times in the last eight years with Classrooms Without Borders to tell his story to educators on the trip as they travel to his hometown and to Auschwitz, his daughter said.“We call it walking in my dad's footprints,” she said.That's where Lucot met him for the first time two years ago.Lucot tries to set up opportunities for his students to interact directly with history through the people who experienced it. He was surprised at the questions students asked, which were mostly about the present and not the past.“A lot of them wanted to know what he thought about the current political system and the future,” Lucot said. “They wanted to talk to him about the best attempts to solve the world's problems.”Senior Nivya Patel said she enjoyed how personal the talk was and being able to ask Chandler questions.“It was an emotional experience,” she said. “It was completely different.”Maggie said it's important to her and for others her age to learn first hand about the past from those who experienced it.“It's so you can relate the ideas of the past to things that are happening now,” she said. “It's always important to learn about hate and where it comes from so it doesn't happen.”
