Last week, the Student Diversity Coalition and the Jewish Family and Children’s Services Holocaust Center hosted a special appearance by Leon, a Holocaust survivor who related his incredible story to the Harker community. Included in his presentation were drawings he had made from his the vivid memories of his experience.
Born in the then-Romanian city of Czernowitz in 1931, Leon was interested in soccer as a child, recalling that he had played the sport since he was first able to walk. In the 1930s, Romania had a policy of tolerance toward Jewish people, which changed when Hitler rose to power. Michael I, Romania’s last king, followed his mother in opposing the Hitler-allied Romanian prime minister’s persecution of Romanian Jews, for which Leon said the king’s entire family was threatened.
Leon was eight years old when Hitler began expanding his control across Europe. He remembered refugees crossing into Romania, for whom his mother made “big, big pots of soup.” In December 1941, all Romanian Jews were ordered to be transported to ghettos. “There was no community outcry like today,” he said. “There was no community protest like today. We left in silence.”
He was separated from his parents and placed into a train car with the other children for a long trek to where they would be held. The very limited water supply had to be rationed and watched closely. “People were ready to give up on life,” Leon recalled. “We lost all shame and self-esteem.”
Upon departing the train, Leon’s family and the other Romanian families were marched to concentration camps. Leon’s mother bribed one of the guards watching over the procession, who looked the other way while the family escaped. They spent three weeks begging for food at a nearby farmers market, and eventually were sent to a ghetto to work and live in a one-room hut. Food was scarce and water was collected by melting snow in a small pot.
At one point, both Leon and his mother contracted typhus, and the staff at the nearby hospital believed he had only hours left to live. He was placed in a crib in the hospital’s morgue, where he lay unconscious for five days. When he woke up, he spotted his father on the way to visit his mother and called out to him. He carried Leon home and nursed him back to health, and his mother eventually came home as well.
“In my 90 years, the five days I spent in the morgue was the only time I lost control of my life,” he said.
The ghetto was eventually liberated, and Leon and his family returned to Czernowitz. Upon returning, Leon went over to a garbage can where he had stashed some family photos as they were being moved into the ghettos. All the photos remained intact.
Later in life, Leon immigrated to the United States and joined the U.S. Army, serving in the Korean War. He also met his wife, Eva, to whom he has been married for 60 years.
He advised the students in the assembly to treasure their education (“I was robbed of my education, and life was very hard”) and to reject hate (“It just begets more hate, nothing else”).
On March 13, students and faculty from Bay Area schools attended the Student Diversity Leadership Gathering, hosted by Harker and led by Rodney Glasgow, head of school at Sandy Spring Friends School in, Sandy Spring, Md. A well-regarded speaker and facilitator in the areas of diversity and social justice, Glasgow delivered a keynote at the start of the event, detailing the ways in which his identity as a Black man changes both how the world sees him and how he sees and acts in the world.
He spoke on how the mask he wears as a precaution during the pandemic has hidden what he feels is his best feature, his smile, which he said puts others at ease. When wearing his mask, he said, “No one can really tell who I am. I’m suddenly every Black man at once. They can’t see that I’m a head of school. They can’t see that I’m an Ivy League graduate. They can’t see that I’m smiling. They can’t see that I’m kind. They can only see that I’m Black.”
Glasgow recalled instances in which he found himself centering his identity, such as when he was interviewing for a job and received half-hearted greetings or was grilled with questions in private to verify that he had graduated from Harvard. “This is an identity moment,” he said. This is not actually a Harvard moment. I’m sitting in a Black moment. I’m sitting in a poor moment. I’m sitting in a you’re-too-close moment. I’m sitting in a is-that-a-mask-you’re-wearing moment.”
In one powerful moment, Glasgow told the story of a Black parent who was detained while waiting with his daughter for the bus to arrive outside the school. After seeing the officer pass by once in his vehicle, he told his daughter to be ready, because he sensed the officer would return. “Could you imagine living a life where the police slowly creep by you and you don’t think, ‘thank goodness they’re going on to solve a crime, thank goodness they’re going on to keep the neighborhood safe,’ you’re thinking, ‘let’s just get ready because I think they’re coming back?’” Glasgow said.
Although the situation was resolved, the parent was upset that none of the other parents present during the encounter checked on him or his daughter. “When we unmask identity, all that’s really sitting there in the center is this deep, deep humanity,” Glasgow continued. “It’s this sense of, they didn’t treat me like a person; they didn’t take care of my daughter like she was human. She had to get on the bus and wonder, do they still see me as the person they saw yesterday?”
Following the keynote, adults and student attendees were put into groups to discuss identity and conduct group activities around their feelings on their own identities and how they affect their perceptions of the world. The attendees later met as a group to talk about what they had learned and what elements of the attitudes displayed during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that they saw in their school communities.
Last week, the Student Diversity Coalition was formally established by seniors Brian Pinkston, Dylan Williams and Natasha Yen and junior Uma Iyer. The goal of the organization is to help create a more inclusive community at Harker and provide a forum for students to discuss issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), as well as encourage students to work toward justice for marginalized people.
After attending the Student Diversity Leadership Conference in Seattle in December 2019, Iyer and Yen were inspired to draft a series of proposals for Harker administrators. They linked up with Pinkston and in July presented the proposals, one of which was the creation of the SDC.
Yen identified a course on race and society she took through the Global Online Academy (a selection of online classes offered at Harker) as key to her realization that Harker needed a way to facilitate similar conversations. “The GOA course not only consisted of students from other Bay Area schools, but also included students from across the country and world,” she said. “After having meaningful and personal conversations on the topics of race and identity with my classmates, I realized that Harker lacked a place to have these important conversations in our own community.”
Iyer, who started at Harker in grade 9, quickly realized that something was missing at her new school. “Unlike communities I was used to being a part of, Harker did not pay as much attention to DEI issues,” she said. “At first, I did not put much thought into this feeling, but when I came back from the Student Diversity Leadership Conference, I realized that Harker did not even have one student organization that focused on diversity, equity and inclusion.”
In addition to its own events, SDC will also support the work of the Gender Sexuality Alliance as well as the establishment of Harker’s Black Student Union and LatinX Affinity Group. SDC is already planning and organizing several community-wide events and activities, including a recent webinar with Christina Guzman, director of Santa Clara University’s Office for Multicultural Learning, and the placing of a land acknowledgement plaque in recognition of Indigenous American Heritage Month in November. SDC also plans to partner with Harker’s Black Student Union in February for Black History Month and put together activities in May for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage month.
“Besides our cultural heritage month events, the SDC will hold open meetings that allow any member of the student body to join,” said Yen. These events will include roundtable discussions on relevant topics, such as the recent wave of racial justice protests. “As the SDC establishes a presence in the community, I hope to see that it becomes woven into the fabric of what it means to be a part of the Harker community!”
Iyer noted the sense of excitement felt that the SDC had been formally established, and expressed more excitement at the prospect of working with affinity groups. “I am very excited that the SDC will be working with the affinity groups because I feel that the affinity groups were a long time coming,” she said. “Not only do they give students a safe space to confide in other students who identify with them, but it also gives students the opportunity to explore their own identity.”