Students in the German and History classes at SGHS recently had the opportunity to meet Vera Emmons, whose mother was a young Jewish girl during the Holocaust and survived various concentration camps until her liberation at age 17. Emmons met with the classes virtually, sharing with them the horrors of the Holocaust through the lens of her mother’s experiences. Emmons used her mother’s own words in past interviews and recordings, photos from her mother’s childhood and the war, and additional historical context woven into each phase of her mother’s story.
Students learned of the stark contrast between their lives today and the life experiences of a girl near their own age leading up to, during and after World War II. Gerda Luner (nee Nothmann) was born in Berlin in 1927. With the passage of laws targeting Jewish people and growing antisemitism, by 12 years of age, Gerda was sent to a foster family in Holland, and she and her sister never saw their parents again. Gerda would lose every member of her family. She found a position with the Philips company, a group that worked to protect Jewish people during the war. Through the entirety of the war, Gerda was moved through six concentration camps as a worker in this company before her liberation from Auschwitz II - Birkenau at the end of the war.
Emmons explained how the horrors of the Holocaust and shaped not only her mother’s life moving forward in America, but also the lives of the family her mother created and her descendants. Students had the opportunity to ask questions following the presentation, and Emmons explained that the Holocaust is not one of a kind— genocides, xenophobia, and terrorism can be found throughout the world’s history and continue today. She shared that the worst of human behavior begins with stereotypes and an “us versus them” mentality, and that it is important for our young people to learn about our darker times in history in order to understand first how they happened and then how to prevent them from happening again. Our students and teachers would like to thank Vera Emmons for her time and for sharing her mother’s courageous life story.