Hinsdale eighth-graders heard firsthand accounts of U.S. servicemen and Jewish survivors who lived through World War II.
“I really believe this is an essential part of our studies,” Rick Dusek, a social studies teacher at Hinsdale Middle School, said referring to the tradition that culminates a month of studying the Second World War and the Holocaust.
The students heard Magda Brown tell how her family was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp when she was 17. Her parents were killed in the gas chambers, but she was sent to a work camp.
They heard John Ullinskey describe how his ship towed the USS Evans on the northwest cost of Okinawa, Japan while kamikazes attacked.
“It took almost 30 hours to go 130 miles,” Ullinskey said. “Not only did we have to cope with the enemy, we had to cope with Mother Nature.”
Irv Abramson explained how he wanted to go to college, but his family could not afford it, so he enlisted in the Army after high school.
“They offered a program where if you enlisted . . . and served at least three years, they said, ‘we will pay for your education, when you come home.’ They didn’t say, if you come home,” Abramson said.
Abramson was with troops who landed at Marseilles, France and fought their way across the country to the Ardennes Forest, where they were involved in the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944 and January 1945.
The Germans were shooting artillery shells into the heavy forest. The shells would hit the trees and hot metal shrapnel rained down, Abramson said.
“I was in a shallow foxhole and the left side of my body was exposed,” Abramson said. The shell fragments burned him, broke his knees, his ribs, punctured his lung and gave him a concussion that gave him permanent hearing damage.
He told the students he was not sharing his story to focus on his injuries, but “to tell you I was just one of many soldiers that sacrificed their lives and their limbs to give the people back home the safety they needed to continue to live in a democracy.”
Abramson also told the students to value their education.
“I hope you never have to sacrifice to get an education,” he said.
Eighth-grader Chase Sikora said the weapons and uniforms the presenters brought captured his interest.
“It was pretty amazing that they have been held and worn by real people in the army,” Chase said.
Nora Rafferty, another student, said it was inspiring to hear the veterans’ stories and the account of Adele Zaveduk, who was a 4-year-old living in Paris when the Germans invaded France.
Zaveduk’s family was Jewish. After her father was taken away, her mother took her and her younger sister to live with strangers in the French countryside, where she thought they would be safer than in Paris.
Zaveduk said she thought her mother would come back for them soon, but they lived there until the war ended three years later.
“She never said goodbye to us,” Zaveduk said.
But while she and her sister lived with the Mullard family in two rooms of a house without running water, her parents separately were sent to Auschwitz.
Zaveduk went to school and church with Mrs. Mullard’s grandchildren and was raised as a Catholic like they were.
Zaveduk’s parent survived German imprisonment. The Russians liberated her father, she said. Her mother was in a march of prisoners from Auschwitz when she was freed. She weighed 65 pounds, Zaveduk said. The Red Cross sent her mother to a hospital in Sweden to recuperate.
Eventually her parents found each other and then came for their daughters. But Zaveduk said she begged Mrs. Mullard to let them stay. She had not forgotten how her mother left them.
“For one year, I never let my mother touch me,” Zaveduk said.
She also argued with her mother over whether she was a Catholic or a Jew, she said.
“It took me 40 years to accept the fact that she never meant to abandon us, she meant to save us,” she said.
Zaveduk showed the students photos of her family and the number tattooed on her mother’s arm.
Nora, the eighth-grader, said hearing Zaveduk’s experiences was important, not simply so she learns what happened during the war, but so that she can tell other people “so no one will forget.”
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