Students learn about the Holocaust through a ‘Hidden Pearl’

Arizona students learn about the Holocaust from a

THE ARTS

‘Hidden Pearl’

By Shannon Levitt

JUDY EGETT LAUFER

It might not seem likely that ninth graders in Mesa, Arizona could see themselves reflected in the life of a 10-year-old girl trying to hide from Nazis in 1940s Poland, but Tate Lamoreaux, an English teacher at Mesa’s Dobson High

School, helped his students do just that by finding what he calls “mirror moments” in “Hidden Pearl,” J.E. (Judy Egett)

Laufer’s young adult novel about a young girl surviving the

Holocaust.

Lamoreaux said it’s much easier for his students to find

“window moments,” or times in the novel that diverge from their own lives: “I am not a girl; I am not a Jew; I did not live through the Holocaust; etc.” Still, when they put a lot of thought into how Pearl’s life mirrored their own, “their good answers were great: I also have to work to help my family; I don’t think my parents [or the people I live with] like me very much either; sometimes I also have to hide parts of myself.”

The book recounts the lives of Pearl and her family who have been forced into hiding by the advance of the Nazis into Poland. A friend of the family finds a farm where Pearl can live and work. The catch is that she has to hide her Jewish identity and pretend to be a Catholic orphan. She also cannot know with any certainty the fates of her parents and siblings.

She experiences a difficult life at the hands of the farm’s owner, a woman who verbally and physically abuses her over the course of her tenure. Moreover, the woman often derides Jews and questions their humanity, leaving Pearl in no doubt what would happen to her should her true identity be revealed. At the end of the story, Pearl is reunited with her

“It is helpful for kids to know that real people went through this, that it wasn’t just a story that I imagined or that somebody made up.”

~Judith Laufer

parents and two of her siblings who survived by working on farms and hiding their identities, too.

Last fall, Arizona passed legislation mandating that the state’s public schools teach about the Holocaust and other genocides at least twice between seventh and 12th grades. Laufer, who had been following the fate of the legislation, contacted Kim Klett, a Dobson High English teacher and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Teacher Fellow, who has taught Holocaust literature for the last 20 years in Mesa.

Klett had already read Laufer’s first young adult historical novel, “Choices,” so she was happy to read “Hidden Pearl” and gauge its usefulness for the curriculum. She told Laufer it fit the bill perfectly.

To get copies of the books to the school, Laufer reached out to Kids Need to Read, a national nonprofit based in Mesa that provides books for underserved libraries and schools across the country. Laufer has worked with the organization for years and helps to find sponsors to buy books for donation. The nonprofit delivered copies of “Hidden Pearl” to Dobson High, where more than half of the student body is economically disadvantaged.

To have these students read her book is a point of pride for Laufer. “My parents were immigrants,” she said. “We were low income children. They came to Canada with $5 and no plan as to what they were going to do and they didn’t speak the language. The idea that my books are going to be in the hands of children who typically can’t afford them, that to me is huge.”

Lamoreaux did a lot of work preparing his students before they read the book, he said. They spent three weeks studying the history of antisemitism in Europe and Germany specifically, and learned about the Nazis, invasion of Poland. Then, they spent two weeks reading “Hidden Pearl” together. “Having that deeper background about the Holocaust, I believe, made the story feel realer for my students,” he said.

There are elements of the story that are relatable to many people. Often, authors who write about the Holocaust detail the horrors of Jews being packed into cattle cars or lined up for extermination in gas chambers, but Laufer keeps her focus on the more ordinary hardships and daily indignities of one girl, who waits in fear and trepidation for the day she will be free to find what remains of her family and tell the world who she really is.

In an early chapter, for instance, Laufer describes how Pearl ran out of her house without shoes and so had to do everything with bare feet, including walking many miles to the farm where she would work. She recounts the hunger Pearl had to learn to live with, the drudgery of her work and the daily insults she had to endure. And she describes Pearl’s hope that a better future awaits.

Laufer, whose professional background is in early childhood education, knows something about how children learn. She’d written books for young children, but writing for older kids began as something of a lark. She wrote “Choices,” for her mother’s 90th birthday and to preserve her family’s history of escaping Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. She was a writer, so she wrote the story, and in the process she learned a lot about writing family memoir. “When people tell you stories, they tell you bits and pieces, but you don’t have the story from beginning to end,” she said.

Much to her surprise, her book was well-received and won the silver medal award for historical novels from the Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards.

When her mother-in-law turned 90, Laufer wrote “Hidden Pearl” for the occasion. After all, her mother-in-law was Pearl, and this was her story. It was also a true Holocaust survivor story, which Laufer knew was important to preserve, not only for her husband’s family but for the general public, especially when so many of the survivors have died or are on the cusp of passing away. Her second book won the gold medal award from Moonbeam.

“It is helpful for kids to know that real people went through this, that it wasn’t just a story that I imagined or that somebody made up.” She also put photos of Pearl and her family at the end of the book, which she said helps kids know the story is real.

Laufer also thought that if she could write stories, true stories about history, they might engage kids who otherwise were not avid readers. “It might give them an opportunity to see that reading is really fun and reading is interesting and reading is entertaining,” she said.

For Lamoreaux’s students, her methods worked. “I had 100% participation with this book,” he said. “My highachieving students read “Hidden Pearl.” My lower-achieving students read “Hidden Pearl”- the kids who never read anything. Many of my students, perhaps most of them, told me something along the lines of, ‘That wasn’t so bad.’ And coming from a freshman who hasn’t ever read a book, that’s a glowing recommendation.”