ALJ High School Teacher Fredy Reyes Attends Holocaust Conference in Berlin

Clark, NJ — Noted German playwright Frank Wedekind once said, “Monuments are for the living, not the dead.” Arthur L. Johnson (ALJ) High School social studies teacher Fredy Reyes spent a week in and around Berlin visiting many such monuments. Reyes attended a week-long program studying the Holocaust and the Cold War.

The trip was run by Centropa , a nonprofit organization that strives to educate teachers from Israel, Europe, and the United States about European history, especially the Holocaust. Seventy teachers from sixteen different countries, including Israel, Macedonia, Slovenia, Hungary, Germany, and the US, attended the conference.

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Each day, participants traveled to a location related to either the Holocaust or an area they chose to study in European history.

The Holocaust-related sites included the location of the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazis planned the extermination of European Jews.

“I was stunned by the beauty of the villa and lakefront where this heinous plot took a scant 90 minutes to develop,” Reyes said. "It was a very strange feeling seeing such beauty and such evil next to each other."

On another occasion, the group visited the notorious women’s concentration camp, Ravensbrück, now a memorial. Roughly 130,000 women and children were imprisoned and tortured there. Of those, 50,000 were murdered.

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The 70 teachers were able to select an area of concentration for their trip. Choices included “Resistance,” “Choiceless Choices,” and “Cold War.”

“I selected the Cold War because I remembered, as the Berlin Wall protests took place in 1989, being glued to the TV hoping the East Germans would win their freedom,” Reyes said.

His team consisted of Kerry Mulligan, from West Palm Beach, Florida; Gozde "Gigi" Sahin, from Istanbul, Turkey; and Reyes himself. They chose to develop a lesson plan entitled “Escape from East Berlin.”

In the lesson, students would be asked, “What if a wall divided your town overnight? How would it impact you?” Students then would use primary source materials to delve into the many ways people escaped East Germany and report their findings to the class. As closure, students would develop an escape plan from a walled city.

“It's such a cool ‘cloak and dagger’ lesson that we think will reach students,” added Reyes' team member Kerry Mulligan.

Reyes has a personal connection to the Cold War as he and his family escaped Communist Cuba in 1971. “Everywhere I turned I saw parallels between the experience of the Eastern Europeans and my family’s plight in Cuba,” he said.

Reyes applied for the grant that made his trip possible several months ago through the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest New Jersey .

“I was very pleasantly surprised when I was notified that I had been chosen," he said. "MetroWest has done amazing things for the Holocaust Studies program at ALJ. I am extremely thankful for its support.”

Reyes added in closing, "The entire experience was life-altering. Seeing the locations and memorials of the Holocaust, World War II, and the Cold War, I was witnessing history."

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