Kent Teacher, Debbie Carlson, Puts Emphasis on Social Justice

The Holocaust Center is so proud to be working with teachers like Debbie Carlson.

Spurred by Holocaust studies, Kent teacher puts emphasis on social justice in the classroom: Slide show of Holocaust sites

By LAURA PIERCE
Kent Reporter Editor
Sep 14 2010

It was the shoes on a riverbank that brought Debbie Carlson close to tears.

The Meridian Middle School teacher was on a trip to Eastern Europe this summer, and her tour group passed by a bronze sculpture of shoes, lined up on a riverbank. There were work shoes, children’s shoes, ladies’ shoes: a mixture of jobs, genders and ages.

The significance of the sculpture wasn’t lost on Carlson, who happened by this spot in the soft light of a summer day in Budapest, along the banks of Danube River with her tour group, while visiting sites of the Holocaust.

The shoes were the wordless reminder of the men, women and children whom the Nazis or their Hungarian counterparts lined up and shot along the riverbank. The bodies fell into the river, to be swept away by the current, their identities lost to their families and the world.

“When they were exterminating the Jews, they would line them up, and shoot them into the river,” Carlson says, of what she learned happened on that riverbank.

For Carlson, the sculpture was a consciousness-raising moment – one of many she experienced on the three-week trip... Read full article and see the slide show