In light of recent events at East the students in Jewish Student Union, or JSU, decided to take it into their own hands to educate their community at East about the past, present and prevention of anti-Semitism. With support from the school and Dr. McKinney, JSU organized to have speakers within the Shawnee Mission East community to come and speak about the Holocaust and their family members who survived.
The first speaker and East alumna, Regina Kort, spoke on behalf of her mother, Sonia Warshawski, who survived the Holocaust. She survived three concentration camps – Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. Warshawski said that she educates “to spread love and to tell what really happened.”
The second speaker and father of senior Lauren Cole, Steven Cole, spoke about his family whole father’s side of the family being in the Holocaust. In March of 2016 the Cole family visited Germany, where they went to the houses of their ancestors that anti-Semitism was so severely inflicted upon in the Holocaust. Steven Cole said, “When we went to see the setting of the Stolpersteine, the memorial blocks in front of my grandparents home in Koblenz, it jarred me into a new kind of look at the thing in terms of both sides of the family.” Their trip added a new perspective on their story that was told in the presentation on Tuesday evening.
