2023-04-23 03:01:00
The present
Cordoba, Argentina, September 2020.
In full social, preventive and mandatory confinement by Covid-19, schoolchildren are torn between weariness and uncertainty. They have lost the school, their last educational bastion. Fathers and mothers despair in front of the screens without achieving what living with peers grants.
A year later, the schools reopen their doors; with bubbles, with difficulties, but they open. In the classrooms, wounds begin to heal.
Les Cayes, Haiti, August 2021.
An earthquake destroys part of the country and disorients half a million girls and boys. Many of them ask where their house was; others, their school; all the future Makeshift teachers set up tents to give classes at any time, on any topic and to anyone.
kyiv, Ukraine, May 2022.
Dazed by the Russian bombardments, the boys ask for explanations. They ask when they will return to school, for them a safe place. Their teachers celebrate that Unesco donates computers to support formal education. In the anti-aircraft shelters, mathematics, history, geography resonate…
Aleppo, Syria, March 2022.
11 years of war have left more ruins than buildings standing. Boys and girls who have not yet been able to escape are fed with garbage, wander among smoking stones and do not understand the word school; many never attended one. The International Red Cross tries to bring them together to teach classes, as a last humanitarian resource.
Khartoum, Sudan, April 2023.
A fight between leaders causes violent armed clashes; the deceased add up to 100 thousand; five thousand are children. In the second poorest country in the world, school activities are suspended indefinitely. Families and religious leaders take refuge in reading the Koran.
Last
Warsaw, Poland, April 1943.
The German Army “relocates” people of Jewish origin in invaded territories. Millions of people are locked up in ghettos and children (the most fragile) begin to die from infections and starvation.
A group of prisoners, with nothing to lose, decides to rebel. The Warsaw ghetto uprising begins, a historical reference to the tragic set of the Jewish Holocaust, also called “Shoah”. Holocaust means “consumed by fire”; Shoah, “catastrophe.”
The educator Henryk Goldszmit, better known as Januz Korczac, is one more prisoner, although, even under these miserable conditions, he intends to support his ideas and his teaching task.
Someone offers Korczac the chance to run away, but he chooses to stay in charge of the more than 200 orphans that still survive. During the day they look for or negotiate food, he treats their wounds from the blows received; and at night, with prudent secrecy, he whispers lessons that everyone calls “classes.”
Nazi forces crush Warsaw uprising in 27 days; 18,000 people died in the initial attack. The survivors are captured and taken to concentration and extermination camps; among them Korczac and the children, who are murdered in gas chambers in Treblinka a month later.
Some, few, manage to survive and decide to activate the memory. They strive to repeat their stories; every detail counts.
Their testimonies are enough to put an end to the growing denialism, although it is not always enough.
Those who still today affirm that the Holocaust did not exist, that the victims were fewer, or that Nazi torment is an exaggerated phenomenon, perhaps they did not have the opportunity of those boys and girls who, under inhumane living conditions, continued to receive “classes”.
There are plenty of teachers for anyone who wants to hear the truth about wars.
* Pediatrician
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#Education #prevents #forgetfulness