Survivors of the Holocaust, along with husbands, wives, children, and grandchildren, were among the guests at the semi-annual Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center and Archives Student Internship Ceremony, held on January 3.
They gathered to hear student interns relay the stories of Holocaust survivors such as Sally Sachs, who passed away in December 2012.
Sally’s remarkable story was shared by Zaydi Luciano ?10, a former QCC student and Holocaust Center Student Intern who returned to join members of Sally Sachs’ immediate family to celebrate her memory.
“It brought joy to our hearts to see how much my grandmother took to Ms. Luciano,” said Sally’s daughter, Gloria. She and her sister, Adele, recently discovered a video recorded in March of 2010 of Zaydi interviewing Sally about her experiences during World War II.
As a Holocaust Center student intern in 2010, Zaydi studied the history of the Holocaust and was assigned to interview Sally Sachs and document her story. Over the next two years, they developed a close bond.
“I have a big family and can’t imagine not having them in my life,” said a tearful Zaydi, who obtained her associate degree from Queensborough in June 2010 and is now pursuing her baccalaureate in liberal arts at Queens College.
“We inform our interns that they are more than students,” said Dr. Arthur Flug, Executive Director of the Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center and Archives. “They are insurance policies that guarantee our survivors that their stories will be passed down in perpetuity.”
Another student intern, Gaelle Muzac, noted the parallels in her own experiences with that of survivor Anita Weisberg. As a young girl, Anita was forced to leave her family and begin a new life in a strange country. Gaelle, originally from Haiti, has painful memories of the country’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake. “I had to leave many of my family members behind,” said Gaelle, who came to the U.S. in April of 2010 with her mother. Gaelle enrolled at QCC in the fall of 2011 to study criminal justice.