First published in the April 23 print issue of the Burbank Leader.
Six Holocaust survivors, one for each school period, will speak to a number of English classes at Dolores Huerta Middle School on Wednesday.
The program, sponsored by the Burbank Human Relations Council and organized by 8th grade English teacher Courtnie Di Piazza, will occur the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The speakers include Joseph Alexander, who survived 12 concentration camps including Auschwitz and Dachau; David Lenga, who survived Auschwitz and Dachau; and Dana Schwarz, who was born in Lviv, Ukraine.
The internationally recognized date for Holocaust Remembrance Day corresponds to the 27th day of Nisan on the Hebrew calendar, marking the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The uprising punctured the myth of a lack of Jewish resistance as more than 1,000 Jewish partisan men, women and children held off multiple Nazi divisions, tanks, artillery and bombing for a month, even when the ghetto was burned to the ground. It is considered the greatest act of Jewish Resistance in World War II.
