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Edouard WAJNRYB
As part of an experiment involving passing on the memory of Holocaust victims, which is usually done in the form of written texts, I set up a project that brought together two groups of 5th and 9th grade students entitled: “Passing on the memory of the Holocaust through narrative and song”. My 9th grade students (from classes 4 and 5) at the La Forêt middle school in Traînou, near Orléans in the Loiret department of France, acting as “ambassadors of remembrance”, worked closely with Ms. Morvan and Ms. Guillaume’s 5th grade classes at the Traînou elementary school.
The classes worked in pairs, each including one 9th grade and one 5th grade class. The project involved reading and analyzing Annette Muller’s autobiography, La Petite fille du Vel d’hiv, which is about how, as a little girl, Annette was arrested as part of the Vel d’Hiv (winter cycling track) roundup in Paris in July 1942. We then held two joint meetings to discuss the book.
With a view to enshrining the memory of the Holocaust in contemporary society, we have also been working on a parallel project focusing on song. To this end, we chose nine French songs with the aim of putting on a joint performance with narration and song, bringing the 9th and 5th grade students together with a professional performing arts organization.
The aim of this memorial research project on Edouard Wajnryb, which I carried out with the help of Ms. Berna, a documentalist and teacher, was to have the 9th graders produce a documentary film to explain to the 5th graders what happened during the Holocaust.
The final outcome of this educational project was a joint field trip to visit to the memorial at Pithiviers station, near to the camp in which Edouard was interned, and two concerts with spoken word and song, exploring the role of French song in commemorating the Holocaust. The two concerts were dedicated to Edouard, who was deported on Convoy 77, and to his brother Serge, who was hidden as a child during the war and survived the Holocaust.
The Shoah Memorial Foundation, the French remembrance organization Souvenir français and the André Maginot Federation all backed the project.
Project leader: Marie Pourriot, literature teacher and project manager in the education department at the CERCIL Memorial Museum for the Children of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, in Orléans, France.
For those who don’t speak French, more information in English is available here on Wikipedia about Annette Muller and the Vel d’Hiv roundup.
