More than a year ago, as Susie Greenberg was sharing information about the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas’ 2025 European Summer Institute for Holocaust Educators, author and educator Alexandra Zapruder wanted to know more about the organization that posted about the trip. That question did more than start a relationship – it laid the groundwork for this year’s trip, which leaves June 18.
“Every year we try to bring something special; special guests, special educators,” said Greenberg, the JCRC’s director of Holocaust education and programming. “This year we’re using her text as the guide, traveling from Lithuania to Poland to Amsterdam. There’s a whole doorway into this realm of Holocaust literature.”
This year’s trip brings 21 educators from 14 states, plus Greenberg and Ethan Roberts from the JCRC, Kristin Thompson from the Humanus Network, Zapruder and her twin brother, who are co-creating an opera based on the diaries from that time.
Zapruder published Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust in 2001. The compilation idea came from Zapruder’s time as a researcher on the founding staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“I was asked to look at the diaries that had been kept by teenagers at the time to help us shape the exhibition,” she said. “I went to the museum’s library, and there were a handful of diaries that had been written, had been translated into English, published in the 70s and 80s, but had gone out of print.
“I started reading them, and I just had this very visceral reaction to them. They were incredibly compelling, very immediate, very much bringing sort of to life the interior life of young people and the immediate circumstances that they faced.”
The stops in Lithuania will focus on the stories for Ilya Gerber and Yitzhak Rudashevski, two young diarists that Zapruder featured in her book. The group will stop in Kaunas and Vilnius and learn about the places Gerber and Rudashevski grew up. They will also read some of their diaries aloud as they learn about their experiences and see where they were from. The stops will include the 9th Fort of Kaunas, which is a mass grave and killing field, the Vilna Judaica Research Center, a branch of the YIVO Institute.
In Poland, Zapruder will introduce diarists Minia Kuper and Abram Isaac Laski (formerly Anonymous Girl and Anonymous Boy in Salvaged Pages), as well as Dawid Sierakowiak and Rivka Lipszyc, who were not included in the book. Also they will learn about Dawid Rubinowicz.
Zapruder said that both Kuper and Laski were both known as anonymous until the past five years or so, when a historian in Lodz was able to find their identities. The Sierakowiak diary was well known but was only translated in small fragments when Salvaged Pages was released. Lipszyc’s diary came to light in the past decade or so.
The trip will end in Amsterdam where participants will learn about David Koker, before getting a “behind-the-scenes” opportunity in the archives department at the Anne Frank House.
In writing her book, Zapruder said she started looking at what made Anne Frank’s diary so famous while so many others were more obscure.
“Initially it was just the five or six diaries that I first found, but then I started looking, and the more I looked, the more I found, and the more things started to surface,” she said. “The project mushroomed; it was a 10 year project to gather the diaries that ended up being included in the book. It was finding material from all different kinds of circumstances [and] trying to really broaden the scope of what kinds of records we read from young people, and then dealing with the whole framing of the Diary of Anne Frank, and sort of how we think about her diary, and what her diary represents, and whether these diaries should be seen in that same light or in a different framework.”
Greenberg said the experience of learning the individual stories is crucial to educating about the Holocaust.
“It’s not 1 story 6 million times; it’s 6 million different stories,” she said. “What we’re doing is trying to convey the history that sitting in a class alone can’t do, and using all the senses offers a powerful connection. When all the senses are engaged, they will have more capability to learn and can help students learn the critical thinking and their roles in society. It enriches them in ways beyond a textbook could.”