A survivor is living history

Abe Chapnick with Long Branch middle school teachers (l-r) Candice Bidner and Gail Dresher.

On Tuesday, March 27, Long Branch Middle School seventh-grade students were invited to a special assembly where they had the honor of meeting Abe Chapnick, a Holocaust survivor.

The seventh-grade class, consisting of nearly 400 students, was learning about the Holocaust in their social studies classes. Teachers Candice Bidner and Gail Dresher invited a local survivor to come and speak to the students about his life before, during and after the Holocaust.

Prior to the visit the students watched the documentary "Paperclips" and began research on a themed project related to the Holocaust.

Students can enter their project in a contest in which they may be selected to participate in a trip to Washington, D.C., to visit the Holocaust Museum.

Ms. Bidner and Mrs. Dresher are coordinating these activities. They chaperoned and coordinated this trip last year for the seventh-graders, and hope to make the trip a yearly event.

Chapnick not only spoke of the horrors of the Nazi genocide, but of tolerance, acceptance, forgiveness, love and friendship. He showed the students a movie called "The Boys of Buchenwald," about how young men who had survived the concentration camps regained a semblance of their lives together, as a family, in a group home in France.

Abe was one of the Boys of Buchenwald. He was 14 when he was liberated, one of nearly 1,000 teenage boys who survived the Buchenwald concentration camp. After the movie, Abe spoke with the students and then held a question-and-answer period. He responded to each student thoughtfully. The students were excited to talk to someone who was a part of history rather than read about it in books.

They were able to connect with him because he was their age when the Holocaust began. After the war, Abe made his way to America where he lived with an uncle, graduated from high school and was reunited with his mother. He went on to become a successful businessman who had a son who is now a doctor, and now has two grandchildren.

Abe feels it is his duty to pass his story on to the young men and women of today's generation. He wants the children to know firsthand what happens when we do not take a stand on genocide and allow brutality to occur because of hate, prejudice and intolerance. Abe is a modern-day hero.

He is 76 years old and the average age of a Holocaust survivor continues to rise.

Knowing there will come a day when children are only able to learn about the Holocaust through books and videos, he speaks to students whenever he is called on all over the state about the atrocities of the Holocaust. The fact that he is willing to relive his ordeal on a regular basis in order to teach the younger generation not only makes him a hero, but a legend as well.