It is apparent that we have not succeeded in teaching our children well. Our students from NYC Public School 270 were just around the corner preparing to enter the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington D.C., where a citizen with a history of hatred and white supremacy attacked the museum with a rifle. His racism, anti-Semitism, Neo Nazism and anti-African American hatred fueled this incident in which he intended to kill and destroy people’s lives. He succeeded by killing a heroic security guard, Stephen Tyrone Johns an African American who valiantly tried to apprehend the shooter and protect people. James van-Brunn the shooter was shot by other guards who arrested him and took him under control.

At the museum that night a new play “Anne and Emmett” was set to debut, a play about hate crimes which, much like “Words of Bonds,” attempts to explore lessons for children from humanity’s darkest periods. The play traces imaginary conversation between Anne Frank, a little girl killed in the Nazi Holocaust who wrote a diary and Emmett Till, a little black boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955. Today would have been Ms. Frank’s 80th birthday.

“Our whole play is about hate, to eradicate hate, and this is an example of hatred,” said the playwright Janet Langhart Cohen, wife of former US defense secretary William Cohen, who had been heading to the museum’s theater for final rehearsals ahead of Wednesday night’s premiere when the attack happened.

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“How do we ensure that ‘never again’ isn’t an empty slogan, or an aspiration, but also a call to action?”

U.S. President Obama asked last week on Holocaust Rememberance Day in Washington D.C. but then he offered only one way in which do to that: BY BEARING WITNESS

The Words of Bonds Documentary Project has been trying to take more concrete steps by producing an informational documentary made for and by New York City area, public and private students, that will not only educate them about genocidal atrocities such as the Holocaust, the Genocide of the Native Americans and those who perished in the African American Slave Trade, but will serve as a project that allows them to interact with these histories as they rush to record and retell the traces of these horrors, straight from the survivors’ hearts to the everyday consciousness of these students.

With the film, web site and other resources fully in development and underway, we refer you to our web site http://www.wordsofbonds.com where you can:

* learn more about the project

* preview select clips and trailer for the film on VIDEOS Page

* leave us a comment, voice or video message

*  share your or your family’s story on our SHARE Page

* discover a wealth of multimedia resources on our LEARN Page

* support us with a sponsorship or tax-deductible donation

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Coming to Terms with the Past Safeguards Human Rights for All:
The UN’s New Holocaust Outreach Programs
By Eve Epstein and Felice Gaer

At the UN, it has taken more than half a century to turn history right-side up when it comes to the Holocaust. Until 1998, top officials were routinely invoking euphemisms such as “World War Two” or “the acts of the Nazi regime” when referencing the Holocaust. Remarkably, no senior United Nations official had ever spoken publicly about the Jews as victims of the Nazi genocide. On the 50th anniversary of the Convention against Genocide former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan ended the UN’s silence when he said that “the Holocaust of the Jews” must never be repeated. Annan’s exhortation was no mere ceremonial pablum. Given the UN’s political realities, it was an act of courage and moral leadership. For the first time in the UN’s history, a secretary-general linked the Second World War and Nazi atrocities to its Jewish context and spoke about the relationship of the Holocaust to the Genocide Convention and the UN’s founding mission.

Today, an impressive UN website, http://www.un.org/holocaustremembrance/ is devoted to Holocaust education and remembrance.

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