ADVENTUROUS: On Thursday afternoon, the kids participated in a three-hour workshop from MoPop (the Museum of Pop Culture).
Annabelle has taken a couple of homeschool classes at MoPOP before, so we thought we'd give this one a go, and this time CJ participated, as well. He can tell you more about it.
Even during the pandemic, the Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) has found ways to keep visitors engaged. One of these is by hosting digital workshops for students in the Seattle area.
On September 17, MoPOP hosted a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Workshop, led by author Rebecca A. Demarest. Each participant was provided with a PDF, to make a choose-your-own-adventure story with. During the meeting, Demarest gave us all advice (and even some "writing cues") on how to write CYOA stories, and how to go from "Point A to Point B."
I wrote a brief story about a librarian who (literally) gets sucked into the world of a fantasy book. During the three hours I was given to work on the story, I incorporated four endings: One where the librarian starts a farm and lives in the fantasy world, one where the librarian passes out after waiting for help for several hours but doesn't wake up, one where the librarian gets lost in a cave, and, lastly, one where the librarian escapes the fantasy world with the help of a wizard.
While the event was enjoyable and a pleasant use of three hours, it was still a tad underwhelming.
Annabelle was supposed to send me a recap, but it seems to be missing from my inbox. I'll have to hit her up again.
SHOCKING STORY: Last week, we turned in to a live, online presentation sponsored by The Museum of Flight. It was a 90-minute talk by museum docent Peter Metzelaar.
The story we heard him tell was horrific and inspiring, terrifying and enlightening.
In 1942, Nazis seized Metzelaar's entire family in Amsterdam except for his mother and him. For the next few harrowing years, Metaelaar and his mother struggled to stay hidden throughout the war. It was a fascinating first-person account. Here's what CJ has to say about it. ...
For the year 2020, The Museum of Flight is hosting a commemoration titled Untold Stories: World War II at 75, dedicated to exploring the history of World War II. On September 16, The Museum hosted a virtual event where visitors were invited to listen to Peter Metzelaar, an 85-year-old Museum docent and Holocaust survivor, share his story of surviving as a Jewish child in Europe during the Holocaust.
After the event started at 6:30 P.M., Metzelaar began talking about his early life, and how, starting at age seven, he had to live in secret in the Netherlands for years on end. To quote the event's page on The Museum's website, "Aided by the Dutch Underground and his mother’s ingenuity, [Metzelaar] managed to stay hidden throughout the war."
Needless to say, Metzelaar's account of surviving a genocide in secret was harrowing. Having to, at age seven, live in secret on your relatives' barn in the rural Netherlands while there are Nazi thugs in jackboots literally looking to kill you, sounds utterly horrific.
After the end of his talk, visitors were invited to ask questions. I do recall that he was asked about his advice for children living in quarantine and isolation right now, but the fear that he had while living in isolation was obviously very different from modern day children quarantining. Unfortunately, I don't quite recall his answer to the question, but I do think the talk was worth listening to.
Here's what Annabelle had to say about the program. ...
Recently, the Museum of Flight held a virtual presentation titled “Hidden Child of the Holocaust,” hosted by Peter Metzelaar. At the beginning of the war, Peter was a 7-year-old Jewish boy in the Netherlands. When his family began disappearing one by one, leaving him with no relatives but his mother, the two of them had to go into hiding to avoid being captured by Nazi forces. They spent years hiding in the farmhouse of a Catholic couple that helped them avoid detection during raids. After spending so much time there, they had another volunteer take them into the city to live in an apartment that was much less susceptible to unannounced raids from Nazi soldiers.
Peter went to public school under the alias “Peter Pelt,” where he pretended to be of Catholic fate so as not to be discovered. He recounted stories of finding shrapnel from air raids on the streets and trading pieces with other children like trading cards. He once even found an explosive that was still live, which he chucked away just in time for it to not explode in his arms. Life in the city was dangerous, but much less so than life at the farm.
One night, he woke before the sun rose and saw his mother sewing a fake Red Cross nurse's uniform. When she finished, she explained to Peter that they were leaving to take a truck to Amsterdam. Since all of the trucks in the area were owned by Nazi soldiers, she had to use that disguise and claim that Peter had been orphaned by friendly fire and she was with the Red Cross, escorting him to an orphanage in Amsterdam. The plan somehow worked, and the two made it to the city of Amsterdam while surrounded by troops that would’ve killed them on site had they known Peter and his mother were Jewish.
Peter’s story was fascinating and terrifying. He endured so much at such a young age, and the fact that he’s still alive to tell the story is a monumental feat considering how easily he could have been killed. It was incredibly brave of him to tell us about all of this when it must have been so scary for him.
You can read more about his story on the Holocaust Center for Humanity's site: https://www.holocaustcenterseattle.org/peter-metzelaar
There's a one hour interview with him on YouTube: <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XMDHF--8Oyw" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Coincidentally, within an hour of watching the presentation, this headline popped up in my Facebook: Nearly two-thirds of US young adults unaware 6ma(illion) Jews killed in the Holocaust
The first three paragraphs of the article are shocking.
Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a new survey has found, revealing shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20th century.
According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.
Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.
What's equally shocking is Sunday morning waking up to headlines that the current President of the United States was at a campaign rally in Minnesota on Saturday, and there, to an almost entirely white audience, he trumpeted a popular eugenics theory. “You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don't you believe? The racehorse theory," he declared.
It strikes me that words like that coming from a cult-of-personality figurehead are exactly how the Holocaust was allowed to happen.
Ignorance of the halocaust is one thing - but thinking it did not happen is disgusting. It is akin to saying slaves in America were happy with their lot.
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