Sometime in November, our class finished Elie Wiesel’s life-changing memoir, Night. In this novel, Elie recounts his experiences in Nazi concentration camps as a teenager. The realness and pain talked about in Night was incredibly jarring and opened up many a discussion about serious topics such as the abuse of power and the long and complex history of racial prejudice. These lessons were very different from what our typical literature class looks like, and it was a crucial look into the lives of the less fortunate throughout history.
After months of reading and listening to such genuine pain for months, our class had learned so much about how deeply the Holocaust affected millions of people. We had, however, only heard one person’s story. So, following our completion of Night, we received a visit from one Ralph Samuel. Mr. Samuel hadn’t experienced life in the concentration camps like Elie Wiesel, but rather gone on a journey called the kindertransport; this was when England offered to take in Jewish children aged 2-15 from countries overtaken by the Third Reich. At the age of seven, Mr. Samuel was taken from his mother and father in Dresden, Germany to live with Mr. and Mrs. Epstein in Bournemouth, England. He lived there for the remainder of his childhood. By what he called a “sheer stroke of luck”, Ms. Samuel was able to join him at the Epstein Manor as a housemaid. He never saw his father after leaving Dresden.
In between PowerPoint slides, Mr. Samuel would pause and ask if we had any questions (and we had many). Fortunately, he was able and willing to answer every question we rattled off. Some of these included asking about his revisiting Dresden, his friends who survived, and his relationship with his cousin, Hans (one of Mr. Samuel’s only surviving friend from Dresden). He spoke of his gradual journey from Bournemouth to Washington, DC, and eventually to Oakland with his mother. He ended by telling us about his talks that he gives in many parts of the world, including Dresden.
After speaking with us for the better part of an hour, Mr. Samuel said his goodbyes and left, leaving us to contemplate his real life experiences. It was difficult to comprehend that here stood a man who had gone through so much, including the loss of a parent, as a small child. Mr. Samuel’s life was so inspiring that I’m positive every 8th grader would have been able to listen to him for many more hours.