All posts by Emily Gowdey-Backus

The Sterns Tell their Stories of Survival

Manny Stern, Eva Stern-Rodriguez '13, and Ritta Stern

Three days after his seventh birthday, Manny Stern, and the last remnants of Antwerp’s Jewish community, caught the last train out of Belgium. It was May 1940 and German troops were encroaching on the Low Countries and northern France.  During the Holocaust, between 1939 and 1945, the Nazis systematically murdered over 6 million people as their forces conquered Europe, Russia, and parts of North Africa.

Mr. Stern met his wife, Ritta, at a square dance at City College in Manhattan, she was 18 and he was 21.  They’ve been married for 58 years.

However, it wasn’t until four or five years ago that Mr. and Mrs. Stern, grandparents of Eva Stern-Rodriguez ’13, decided to start telling their stories of survival during the Holocaust. On April 16 the Sterns visited Assistant Head of School and history and global studies teacher Glenn Swanson’s Hitler and Nazi Germany class to tell these stories.

Below are the stories retold by Mr. and Mrs. Stern, on April 16, 2013, with occasional editing for readability.

Manny Stern
Until a number of years ago I never talked about my experiences, I wasn’t particularly interested, I didn’t attend conferences and conventions and meetings, I didn’t get newsletters, I didn’t care about it.

About five years ago, we had a guest speaker at our synagogue and he was the former Israeli Ambassador to Belgium. He started his talk by saying, ‘My story begins on May 12, 1940 in Antwerp, Belgium when my family and I took the last train out of Belgium that was allowed to leave.’ Then he went on to tell a story that left me very disturbed because it was a parallel story to that of my family. At the end of his talk he asked for questions and I said, ‘Mr. Ambassador, I was on that train.’ Continue reading

The Laramie Project Interviews

The Williston Theatre’s spring production this year is The Laramie Project, a play by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project that was based on a small town’s reaction to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shephard, a University of Wyoming student.  During a recent break between rehearsals, Emily Ditkovski, the director of the Williston production, and Persis Ticknor-Swanson ’14, a cast member, sat down to talk about preparing for the play, audience empowerment, and bullying.

The Williston Theater’s production of The Laramie Project opens on April 25 at 7:00 p.m.   Performances continue on April 27 and May 2-4 at 7:00 p.m. and April 26 at 7:30 p.m.  Click here to purchase tickets online.

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There Are Mountains Beyond Mountains: MLK Day Speech by Daphne Lamothe P’15, ’16

Good Morning,

Thank you Mr. Hill for your warm welcome. I’d also like to thank Bridget Choo, David Sanders for their invitation to address you all today, and to William Huang for his wonderfully adept assistance with the technology. I’m honored to speak to you all. As a Williston parent, I have come to know and appreciate all the good work that you do.

While preparing my remarks, I decided to give them a title: “There are Mountains beyond Mountains, So Put on your Traveling Shoes” and I hope it makes sense once I’m done speaking. Essentially I want to talk to you about some music and art that has touched me and that speak to some important points:

  • The Expression of identity through art, storytelling and music
  • The ways that artists try to convey their purpose and passions to other people through the stories they tell
  • And the ways that sharing stories create awareness of ourselves as members of a larger community.

Much of what I say is inspired by a sentiment Dr. King expressed in his final speech, “I’ve Been to The Mountaintop,” which he delivered on April 3, 1968, a day before he was assassinated. The speech begins with Dr. King saying:

“And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, ‘Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?’ I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God’s children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn’t stop there…”

After traveling through history and identifying some of society’s greatest civilizations, he concludes, “strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, ‘If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy.’” Dr. King recognized that this was an odd thing to say because the world was, as he put it, is “all messed up. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around.”  But he recognized the potential for goodness and the beauty that existed in the place he stood, in that historical moment. I believe he was able to open himself up to the many challenges because he had a conviction of his potential to be an agent for social change and justice. Continue reading