Teaching tolerance

Local high school students spend King Day learning about the Holocaust at a museum in L.A.The walkway led through a pair of grimy metal gates, then turned into a dim corridor with a pair of ominously marked doors. One read “Able-bodied,” the second “Children and Others” -- the words that pointed so many individuals to life or death.

It was only a replica of the Auschwitz concentration camp, but for the 38 Newport-Mesa high school students who packed the exhibit Monday morning, it appeared real enough.

This year, to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, groups from Corona del Mar High School and Newport Harbor High School gathered at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles to learn about the true effects of prejudice. For more than two hours, the students took an interactive tour of oppression throughout the world -- including the persecution of women, Third World genocides and, most prominently, the Holocaust.

Two Corona del Mar students, junior Zan Margolis and senior Caitlin May, organized the trip for their classmates. Zan, 17, the student body’s community service representative, said she wanted to bring a humanitarian message to a larger group.

“A lot of the time, we do these diversity projects and it’s the same group of people who do it again and again,” she said. “That kind of defeats the purpose of diversity.”

Early Monday, 29 Corona del Mar and nine Newport Harbor students boarded a bus for the museum, which opened in 1993 under the leadership of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Accompanied by Denise Weiland, the advisor of the Tolerance Among People club at Corona del Mar, the students watched films on human rights and went through an extensive, interactive display on the history of Nazi Germany.

The tour guide was Eddie Ilan, a Holocaust survivor who grew up in Poland and lost his immediate family in the genocide. In a calm, sometimes jocular voice, Ilan mixed stories of his own experiences with the larger historical picture.

During the tour, each student was given a card displaying the picture of a Holocaust victim; toward the end, participants slipped the cards into machines and received printouts of each victim’s life story. Another part of the exhibit featured a series of mannequin displays depicting Hitler’s rise to power, starting at an outdoor café in 1932 and moving to the final stages of World War II.

A common theme of the exhibit, and of Ilan’s narration, was the complicity of ordinary citizens in the Nazi regime. The Holocaust, Ilan noted, occurred largely because of the support or apathy of other Europeans.

“Hitler didn’t kill anybody,” he said at one point. “The only person he shot was himself.”

The trip took place while the Newport-Mesa Unified School District was closed for the holiday. Caitlin, 18, the co-president of Tolerance Among People, said her school would hold a series of events this week to honor King Day. The student body, she said, would set up a “dream tree” in the quad where students could pin up comments, and her club planned to post signs reading “Hate is taught. Re-evaluate your education.”

One Newport-Mesa visitor had a close connection to genocide. Don Han, an officer from Orange County Human Relations who works with Newport Harbor High, grew up in Laos during the 1970s under a repressive communist regime.

During his childhood, Han said, he often witnessed people being imprisoned or killed for dissent; at the same time, in neighboring Cambodia, Pol Pot’s regime was liquidating millions of intellectuals and other perceived enemies.

“We would see bodies sometimes floating in the Mekong River,” Han recalled.

Zan, who had visited the Museum of Tolerance before while in elementary school, said the experience meant more to her this time because she knew the history better.

“It opened my mind the first time, but now I have the shock value plus the historical factor,” she said.20060117it7p70ncDOUGLAS ZIMMERMAN / DAILY PILOT(LA)Students from Corona del Mar and Newport Harbor high schools watch a presentation about understanding prejudices at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The students visited the museum in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. 20060117it7p7encDOUGLAS ZIMMERMAN / DAILY PILOT(LA)Students from Corona del Mar and Newport Harbor high schools watch a presentation about understanding prejudices at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The students visited the museum in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.