Greg Gutierrez

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STUDENTS LEARN MEANING OF WORD by David Berlin

When teacher Greg Gutierrez realized his students didn't know the meaning of the word “prejudice,” he decided to show them. Gutierrez took his ninth-grade English class to the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles two weeks ago, where they met Henya Spitzberg, a Hungarian Jew and Holocaust survivor. The trip was made possible because of the generosity of others.

“Honestly, as I sat there listening to Henya, I wanted to bolt outside into the sunlight and wait,” Gutierrez said. “Her story just tore me up. “But I reminded myself that if I was going to ask my students to listen to her, I needed to listen, too.”

Henya had been in the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen in Germany, and was liberated en route to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Her mother sang for her freedom and miraculously kept all four of her children alive, dodging death daily.

Ninety-seven students were able to go to the museum with the help of the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Community Foundation and a local donor, Michael Brau. Many had never left San Diego County before taking the field trip. The idea for the trip came to Gutierrez months ago when he was discussing the word “prejudice” with students and was surprised to find they didn't know what it meant.

“I was actually kind of shocked, but then I asked my own two kids at home who were 9 and 14 and they really didn't (know) either,” Gutierrez said. “They know what racism is but they didn't know what prejudice is, so we started talking about it.” Gutierrez thought the best thing to do was take his students on a field trip to the Holocaust Museum. “Field trips are out of the question with budgets these days, but I said, 'Let me shoot out some e-mails and see what happens,'” he said.

The response from the local Jewish community was huge. “We were just so impressed with (Gutierrez) and the fact that it was so important to him to communicate this story to these kids,” said Linda Feldman of the American Jewish Committee. “After all they're not Jewish. It's not their story.” The American Jewish Committee doesn't usually pay for trips for local schools but Feldman said she felt compelled to help. She appealed to the committee's office in Washington, D.C., which offered $1,500 for transportation.

“We consider ourselves Jewish ambassadors to the world, the nation and the community,” Feldman said.

Brau, a member of the executive committee, gave $350 toward the trip and accompanied the students to Los Angeles.

A few days afterward, students wrote about their experiences and read them aloud in class. “I was surprised when you wanted to know about my culture and the differences between mine and other cultures,” ninth-grader Callista Copley wrote to Brau. Chrystal Ronquillo wrote to Spitzberg: “You are a wonderful woman. Amazing and strong. . . . I know you don't like people to pity you. Me either. I hate it. We're the same and in different ways. I thank you for letting me know that even if bad things happened in the past, our lives move on.”

Next year, Gutierrez said he hopes to repeat the experience with even more students.

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