Driven indoors by smoke from wildfires, 30 middle-school students from the GO Project Summer Programme who were to have visited memorials in the grounds of the United Nations Headquarter, engaged instead with photographs of the memorials, under the guidance of members of the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme, the Outreach Programme on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery, the Outreach Programme on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the United Nations, and the Srebrenica Genocide and the United Nations Outreach Programme.
The students learned about the Ann Frank tree - a living memorial to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust; the “Ark of Return” memorial to the victims of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, the “Flame of Kwibuka” to the victims of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the “Flower of Srebrenica” memorial to the victims of the 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, The students learned about each history through the stories of young people who had experienced those histories.
12-year-old Isaac, who had recently read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in school, was excited to learn that a sapling descended from the horse chestnut tree that Anne Frank could see from her hiding place in the Secret Annex, grows in the garden of United Nations Headquarters. On 12 June 2019, marking the 90th anniversary of Anne Frank’s birth, the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme, together with the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect organized the official dedication of the sapling in the garden of the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Every year in June, representatives of Permanent Missions and United Nations personnel gather beneath the Anne Frank tree and reaffirm their commitment to Holocaust remembrance and education.
Students learned about young people like Anne Frank and her legacy, whose writing stands as testimony to the humanity of the victims, and continues to inspire young and old; Olaudah Equiano, enslaved during the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans; Germaine Tuyisenge Müller’s survival of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda at the age of nine; and of Esmir Bajraktarević, the 21-year-old member of Bosnia and Herzegovina national football team, whose parents met after fleeing the 1995 Srebrenica genocide.
Through these engagements, students reflected on the distinct histories represented by each memorial and the shared consequences of racism, prejudice, discrimination and conflict. Challenged to be “flames of hope”, the students considered how they could promote inclusion and mutual respect in their classrooms and in their communities.