PROVIDENCE Five Providence College students will participate in the annual Interfaith Commemoration of Yom Ha'Shoah on Sunday, April 15 at 3 p.m. at Temple Emanu-El in Providence. They are part of Dr. Barbara A. Silliman's "Studies in the Holocaust" class a spring offering in the college's School of Continuing Education that uses historical and literary works and film to focus on the horror of Hitler's "final solution."
At the commemoration known as the Day of Remembrance the students will read character dialogue and narration from the Readers Theatre performance of Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, which depicts the courageous actions of a small group of university students who founded a non-violent, anti-Nazi resistance movement in Germany in 1942-43.
Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and three other Christian students at the University of Munich, along with their philosophy professor, founded the White Rose movement. They wrote and distributed a series of leaflets encouraging the German people to oppose the Nazi regime. In February 1943, Sophie, Hans, and Christoph Probst were captured, interrogated, tried and executed by guillotine. The other group members were executed later that year. The students' legacy of courage and faith in the face of implacable evil is celebrated throughout Germany.
Other members of Dr. Silliman's class will attend the service and assist with the distribution of white roses and copies of the Sixth leaflet of the White Rose movement. This final leaflet was smuggled out of Germany. Re-titled "The Manifesto of the Students of Munich," it was dropped by Allied planes throughout Germany in July 1943.
The ceremony will also include traditional prayers and songs dedicated to the six million Holocaust victims, a procession of Holocaust survivors, the presentation of the "Never Again" award by the Jewish Federation of Rhode Island, and the traditional walk to the Holocaust Museum's Memorial Garden for a memorial service. The public is invited to attend.
(This article originally appeared in The Providence Visitor)
