Learning About Prejudice: International Holocaust Remembrance Day

“Where can discrimination lead if we don’t stop it?” was the question Mr. Tyree asked the Eaglebrook School community this morning during assembly. Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The United Nations General assembly designated this day in 2005 as a day for the world to remember the devastataion that was the Holocaust. The reason for the January 27 date is that it was on this day in 1945 when the Allies liberated Auschwitz.

Mr. Tyree began the assembly by speaking about prejudice and how it begins and what it leads to. “Acting with compassion and humanity to all people, this sounds great in theory but grows more and more difficult in practice. In order to feel accepted, we go along with the model behavior of excluding people who are different,” he told the group. “That need to be accepted, not just by some but by as many people as possible is so important, so critical to our self image, how we feel about ourselves, that it is crippling us.” Watch more of what he said to the group here.

Some students spoke, giving a history of the Holocaust and then some poetry written by children who were incarcerated at the Terezin Concentration Camp in the former Czechoslovakia. Watch them read the poems here. Mr. Tyree closed the assembly by asking a powerful question: “Will you stand up in the face of intolerance, prejudice, and cruelty?”