Kaimuki Christian School student shares Holocaust survivors’ memories

Just 16 years old, Emily Kuwaye already has had the good fortune — and good parenting — to have experienced cultures as far-flung as Slovakia, Japan, France and the Philippines.

“My parents value traveling because it opens you up to different cultures, exposes you to history and allows you to see what people’s mindsets are,” Kuwaye says.

For Kuwaye, a rising senior at Kaimuki Christian School, the most significant trips traverse time as well as space.

Four years ago, for example, Kuwaye’s grandmother Joyce Watanabe took her on a journey across Eastern Europe. While in Poland the two visited Auschwitz, the World War II Nazi concentration camp. Their experience of inhabiting the same space where 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered during World War II left an indelible impression on Kuwaye.

“There’s a grimness and a heaviness that you can almost feel,” she says. “I could feel the sadness and the misery in the air. There are people who claim the Holocaust is a hoax, but you can feel it for yourself that it isn’t. People died there, and if we don’t remember that, it’ll happen again.”

Last winter, Kuwaye entered the 19th annual Holocaust Art & Writing Contest as part of a class requirement. As part of the contest, entrants were required to watch videos and read testimonials from Holocaust survivors, a task that led Kuwaye to learn the story of Cesia Kingston and her sister Nadzia, whose fierce dedication to each other and commitment to surviving led them to a daring escape from a Nazi death march.

The biography reminded Kuwaye of the feelings her earlier visit to Auschwitz evoked and of the close bond that she shares with her twin sister, Elise. Inspired, she composed the poem “Your Memory,” in which she speaks directly to Kingston, acknowledging both the suffering Kingston endured and the limits of her own ability to make sure that the lessons of her experience are not lost.

“But that does not mean I cannot try,

From this day on I will share this treasured message,

In the hope that my words will ensure that your memory will never be silenced.”

The poem garnered Kuwaye first-place recognition in the contest, which drew entries from 255 schools around the world. As part of her prize, Kuwaye, mother Ann Watanabe (a counselor and history teacher at Kaimuki Christian) and her literature teacher JoAnna Fong were flown last month to Los Angeles, where they visited the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the Japanese American National Museum and the Museum of Tolerance, among numerous other activities.

Kuwaye says she was particularly moved by the time she got to spend braiding challa and listening to the personal tales of Holocaust survivors like Sonja Rosenwald, who was conscripted to work in ammunition plants during the war; Isabelle Szneer, who was able to avoid transport to a concentration camp via a sham marriage to a sympathetic 80-year-old Belgian retirement home resident; and Gregory McKay, who as a small child was transported in a black bag on a 10-day journey from a safe house in Amsterdam to Switzerland.

“The most important thing is not going out and raising $1 million for the cause, but just listening to what they have to share,” Kuwaye says. “Their fear is that it will all be forgotten when they are gone. I’d like to help to tell their story.”

Kuwaye’s desire to keep history alive is especially significant in light of a Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany survey of 1,350 Americans that found that 66 percent of millennials, and 41 percent of all American adults, do not know what Auschwitz was. The same survey found that 41 percent of millennials and 31 percent of all American adults believe that 2 million or few Jews were killed in the Holocaust when, in fact, the real figure is approximately three times larger.

And as Kuwaye so forcefully argues, the value of history is realized in the conviction to act.

“When things are going south, you can’t just stand by and let it happen,” she says. “Being a bystander doesn’t make you innocent. Standing by idly allows hatred to run rampant. We need to look out for each other and learn to respect each other for who we are.”

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.