On Tuesday, March 21, the 8th grade students at St. Francis attended an event at Wahoo Public School which was part of the “The Week of Understanding” presented by The Holocaust Center for Humanity. There were two speakers: Dr. Steven Wees, a long time Omaha resident and rheumatologist and the son of Holocaust survivor Elizabeth Bodek Wees, and Peter Metzelaar, who survived the Holocaust as a child with the help of his mother and others.
Dr. Wees shared some of the history and geography of The Holocaust interspersed with video testimony from his mother who shared her story with the Shoah Foundation after over 50 years of silence on the topic. He believes that what she had to say is important for others to hear, so he lets her tell the story of her experience, but he elaborates on what she says giving historical background.
As Dr. Wees moved through his presentation, his mother’s face in the video showed more and more the grief she had felt throughout so much of her life. She was 13 years old when the Holocaust came to her small town in the Sub Carpathian Rus—just below Ukraine. Wees began to research his mother’s Holocaust experience after she gave her video testimony and more so after she died. She was reluctant to speak of her experience and had shared nothing with him or his siblings because it was far too difficult.
