‘Emotional experience’

Jacob Skiermanski talks Wednesday about a project that he completed on the Holocaust with fellow eighth graders Matt Saley and Drew Witt during a showcase of the students' work on the world changing event at Prairie Grove Junior High School in Crystal Lake. Community members and parents toured the library and spoke with the different groups about their projects. (Justin Edmonds – jedmonds@nwherald.com)

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PRAIRIE GROVE – Holocaust remembrance poems, Stars of David, and lists of concentration camp victims line the tables at what has become a local makeshift museum.

The works are the culmination of long-term projects by eighth-graders who’ve been studying the Holocaust at Prairie Grove Junior High, said Heather Ol­son, a language arts and literature teacher at the school.

“It’s an emotional experience for them,” she said.

Students traditionally have done an in-depth study of the Holocaust, but this is the first year that they’ve displayed their projects in a museum-style setting, said Kate Bieschek, also a language arts and literature teacher at the school.

“Every year the projects seem to be more and more phenomenal,” she said.

One of the displays is a poster listing 1,200 names of Holocaust victims. Each name was written in tiny black letters.

“It would take over 8,028 filled posters to equal the number of poor victims who tragically died in the Holocaust,” an accompany­ing sign read.

Courtney Lefevre, a student who worked on the poster, said it took about 10 hours for her and her partners to write out all the names.

“We really thought [the victims] kind of deserved [the recognition],” she said.

Maggie Peirson made a plaster model of a Star of David with her group. It was inscribed with the words “Tolerance” “Support” and “Love.”

She said they were inspired to do the project after learning that Jews wore the symbol during the Holocaust so it would be easier to discriminate against them.

“When you think of Jews, you think of the Star of David,” Pierson said. “But we wanted [people] to think of it in a good way, not in a bad way.”

Bieschek said one of the goals was to teach students about tolerance and compassion.

“The other thing we like to weave in there too is the anti-bullying theme,” she said. “I don’t think students really understand the impact that bullies have on people, and we try to iterate to them Hitler was one of our world’s biggest bullies.”

Ross Carpenter and his partner, Mark Jimenez, also focused on the Star of David for their project. They built a large-scale wooden model of the symbol.

“Sometimes I feel my life kind of sucks,” Carpenter said. “But then I think about the life of a Jew at this time, and it brings you down to earth.”