Rising Starr Student Honors Child Holocaust Survivor

Shannon McKillip displays the wall hanging she quilted in honor of Inge Auerbacher along with Mariella Crea, a speaker from The Breman Jewish Heritage and Holocaust Museum in Atlanta, who gave a presentation about her mother who helped save Jews from concentration camps.

An assignment on the Holocaust has created a special friendship between a student and child survivor of a Nazi concentration camp.

Every year eighth graders in Suzanne Carey’s language arts classes at Rising Starr Middle are required to do a brief biography on a child who was in the Holocaust. This is part of the unit on The Diary of Anne Frank.

Most biographies are done on children who died in concentration camps, but eighth grader Shannon McKillip found, after some Internet research, that her child was actually a survivor.

Inge Auerbacher was sent to the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia when she was seven years old. She was lucky, only one percent of the 15,000 children there survived. She was 10 years old when she was released.

She now lives in New York City and is a lecturer and inspirational speaker. Shannon contacted Auerbacher via email to let her know that she was going to honor her by planting a flower in the school’s Holocaust Children’s Memorial Garden as well as quilt a butterfly wall hanging in celebration of her life. She asked for her favorite flower and colors.

Honored that Shannon had selected her for the project, Auerbacher emailed pictures of her hometown in Kippenheim, Germany, her immediate family and the star she had to wear in the concentration camp.

“One teenager from my camp wrote a poem, ‘I Will Never See Another Butterfly.’ The butterfly was yellow and it is also the color of the stars we had to wear. I think any yellow flower for the garden would be just wonderful,” Auerbacher wrote.

Shannon chose a Yarrow plant for the garden. She quilted a wall hanging with a butterfly motif, the symbol for children who died in concentration camps, and incorporated the pictures that Auerbacher sent to her. Shannon and Auerbacher have exchanged several emails since the project began. Most recently, Shannon sent her pictures from the garden and of the wall hanging.

“My dearest Shannon, oh my gosh, my tears are flowing,” she said in response the photographs. “I shall treasure these forever. I must meet you in the future, and I want to see my flower blooming in the garden.”

Shannon says she hopes to meet Auerbacher someday, but until then, she is surprising her by sending the wall hanging as a gift. Much of it is hand quilted and took about a month to complete.
“I have been quilting since I was five years old. My grandmother is a very good quilter and she inspired me to quilt,” Shannon says.
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School’s German Award Lands Fayette County Student a Free Trip to Germany

Competing against 349 schools and 38,865 students throughout the United States and Canada, Whitewater High School in Fayetteville emerged as one of seven schools in North America to receive the Goethe-Institut Award of Excellence in German.

As one of the winning schools, Whitewater High School received the grand prize: an all expenses paid trip for one student to attend a Young Learner’s Course in Germany, sponsored by the Goethe-Institut. Lee Frye, a junior currently in German II, was selected as the deserving student of the trip.

German teacher Candace McCollough Dixon organized the contest, which began in the fall when students watched a video titled “Greenagers: Battling Climate Change in Germany,” and completed a multiple-choice quiz on the content. All students enrolled in world language courses were eligible to participate. Results of the quizzes were used by the Goethe-Institut to determine the winning schools.

Whitewater students who scored a 100 on the quiz were eligible to participate in an essay competition to determine the winner of the trip. Students were asked to explain why they should be chosen and how they would support the German program at the school. A committee read and scored each essay with Frye emerging as the overall winner.

Frye will travel to Germany in July. He will select the language course and city for his studies.

The Goethe-Institut was founded in 1951 to promote a wider knowledge of the German language and foster cultural cooperation between Germany and other countries. It is a non-profit, publicly funded organization involved in a variety of cultural relations activities. With 144 branches in 80 countries, including seven in the United States and two in Canada, the Goethe-Institut plays an important role in providing access to German language and culture all over the world.

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Fayette County Retired Teacher Honored by the Federal Republic of Germany

The Federal Republic of Germany has awarded the Cross of Merit, First Class, to retired Fayette County High German teacher Mechthild Vogt.

She was officially presented with the honor on October1 during a special ceremony at the Georgia Department of Education. Dr. Lutz Goergens, consul general of the Federal Republic of Germany in Atlanta, presided over the presentation.

The Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merit) is the only general state decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany, between 3,000 and 5,200 awards are given every year in all eight classes.

Vogt taught German at Fayette County High for 30 years, for 20 of them she sponsored a German-American Partnership exchange program with a high school outside of Frankfurt in Hofheim, Germany. Over 500 German students visited Fayette County during that time, making friends with American students and experiencing American culture first hand. She spent many of her summer vacations taking her students to Germany for three weeks for a similar experience with German culture.

In awarding the Cross of Merit, Goergens credited Vogt with helping people from both countries better understand each other.

“Ms. Vogt, there is more understanding and sympathy for Germany in the United States today as a result of your work. And there is more understanding and sympathy for the United States in Germany,” he said.

Vogt looked back on her career with great satisfaction as she summarized her feelings while finishing her remarks.

“If I have done my part to help with the understanding and with friendships between our peoples, then I feel that I have reached my most ambitious goal and that all my work was worth it,” she said.

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