Keeping up fight against hatred
Holocaust group gives Douglas gift
As Holocaust studies teacher Ivy Schamis was finishing a lesson on the dangers of irrational hatred, bullets flew through her classroom door.
Students ran for the perimeter of her classroom at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Two were killed and six wounded.
A month after the shootings, she still finds the irony of teaching that lesson that day “chilling.”
“I think about it constantly,” Schamis said. “We were doing a lesson on combating hate.’’
The lessons she tried to convey are again being taught, but this time without necessary supplies that remain locked up in a building she and her students can no longer enter.
To help her, the Westonbased Holocaust Learning and Education Fund has donated $1,000 to replenish the missing material. The charity encourages Holocaust studies throughout the United States.
Craig Weiner, the fund’s
president, said he got chills when he learned shooter Nikolas Cruz had left at least 180 rounds of ammunition inside magazines that bore Nazi swastikas at the school.
“This is why it’s so important not only to study the Holocaust, but to learn from the Holocaust,” Weiner said. “There is so much hatred that has permeated our society. It’s disgusting when you think about it.”
On Feb. 14, Schamis was finishing a lesson with her fourth-period class on Margaret Bergmann Lampert, a German athlete excluded from the 1936 Berlin Olympics because she was Jewish.
The teacher and her students were in Schamis’s classroom of 17 years, room 1214, in the building targeted by Cruz.
Her 30 students were answering questions on a computer. There were 20 minutes left in class. She heard shots in the hallway.
Students flew out of their seats and headed to the classroom’s sides. Shots came through the classroom door’s glass panel.
She said everyone hovered and tried to be quiet. Two students, Helena Ramsey and Nick Dworet, were killed. Six were injured.
A SWAT team entered the classroom within 10 minutes and escorted everyone out.
One of Schamis’s classes had visited Nova Southeastern University’s Holocaust Reflection and Resource Room, founded by Weiner and his wife, just two weeks before the shooting.
“We were all devastated when we heard about the shootings,” Weiner said. “We felt it was our responsibility [to help her] because she lost so much.”
Weiner plans to deliver another gift to Schamis this week: a box of additional Holocaust education classroom supplies, courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In the meantime, Schamis said she and her students have become “super close,” texting several times a day. She took her fourth-period class out for ice cream a few days ago so they could talk freely outside the school.
“It took a while to get back to normal,” she said.