Fifteen students at Rivendell Academy will present work from their “Holocaust and Human Behavior” class on Thursday night.
“Voices in the Dark” will feature poetry and other writings by Holocaust survivors from the student’s textbooks. In addition, a team of students will talk about survivor Marion Pritchard, the former Vershire resident who in her young adulthood rescued Jewish children in her native Holland during World War II. Pritchard died in 2016.
Rivendell junior Elizabeth Noyes, senior Maia Perry and German exchange student Yannick Kandulski will read from Victory, Sonia Weitz’s poem recalling her and her sister’s survival of city ghettos and concentration camps in their native Poland, while more than 80 of their family members perished, said Anna Alden, who teaches music and theater at Rivendell.
The presentation is a combined effort Alden and social studies teacher Kirsten Surprenant, who has been teaching the Holocaust class for 20 years. The collaboration will continue in May, when Alden’s theater class stages The Sound of Music.
“The more connections our students make, and the more background they have about our theater production, the more relevant it is for everyone,” Alden wrote in an email last week.
Rivendell Academy’s Holocaust and Human Behavior class presents “Voices in the Dark” on Thursday night at 7, in the Orford high school’s west-wing multipurpose room. Admission is free.