Friday, May 5, 2006
After a month of special events remembering the Holocaust at the Brown v. Board of Education NHS, the Kansas Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony was held on April 27, 2006 on the front steps of the site. Justus Rosenberg, a Holocaust survivor, was the featured speaker of the event. The ceremony also featured Cheryl Brown Henderson of the Brown Foundation, Rabbi Lawrence P. Karol of the Temple Beth Shalom, and Superintendent Dennis Vasquez.
Rosenberg was the youngest member of the Emergency Rescue Committee led by American Varian Fry, which helped rescue more than 2,000 people in France during World War II. Rosenberg was a courier for the team and was asked to carry secret messages, false papers, funds and instructions. In 1941, Rosenberg was arrested and placed in a concentration camp whose inmates were to be sent to Auschwitz. The day before the inmates were sent to the death camp, he managed to escape. He returned to Paris after the war. Many members of his family had perished in the Holocaust. Rosenberg obtained a scholarship in the United States which led to a Ph. D. and a career in academia and American citizenship. He is currently a Professor of Comparative Literature at Bard College and a Visiting Lecturer in the Humanities at the New School University. Rosenberg also serves as the project Co-Director of the Varian Fry Foundation Project.
During the month of April, Brown v. Board of Education NHS displayed the exhibit "Varian Fry, Assignment: Rescue," which was on loan from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Justus Rosenberg speaks at the Kansas Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony on the front steps of the site.
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