Walking through “Remember the Children, Daniel’s Story,” an interactive exhibit about the Holocaust on display in San Francisco, sixth- grader Tramaine Carter kept repeating the same refrain.
“This is wrong,” said the student from San Francisco’s Marina Middle School.
Based on experiences of children who survived the Holocaust, “Daniel’s Story” takes viewers step by step through the odyssey of one composite child. Carter’s class recently visited that children’s exhibit at Herbst International Exhibition Hall.
“This is freaking me out that somebody hates so much they can do this to another human being,” he said after staring into a bowl of muddy turnip soup in a simulation of the dimly lit ghetto room Daniel and his family share.
The 5,000-square-foot installation recreates in intricate, almost life-size detail aspects of Daniel’s life: a tree-lined path in his German town, rooms in his home, and the barbed-wire gates leading to the concentration camp where he was interned and his mother and sister Erika met their deaths.
Photos, videos and historic artifacts add to the realism, as do excerpts from Daniel’s diary, a composite of writings by children who survived the Holocaust.
Some 4,000 students from the Bay Area and beyond have toured the installation since it opened March 1.
Last month, while some Marina Middle School students seemed most taken with the novelty of being able to play with Daniel’s toy train and to open and shut the suitcase that followed him to the concentration camp, others stopped to carefully read excerpts from his diary and absorb each step of his journey.
“In my gut, I feel depressed,” said Miguel Alvarez, looking at an archival photo of children laboring in the ghetto, yellow stars pinned to their coats to mark them as Jews. “You see children just working. They’re supposed to get some education.”
Before visiting the exhibit, the San Francisco students got an education of their own. Though sixth graders at Marina Middle School generally do not study the Holocaust, according to teacher Lorraine McLeod, they did so this year in preparation for “Daniel’s Story.”
Even so, before entering the exhibit, tour guide Alison Brody made sure the students had a clear grasp of such basic terms as “Holocaust,” “Aryan” and “Nazi,” as well as an understanding of which groups perished in addition to Jews. Some students asked questions such as “What religion were the Nazis?”
The religion “they believed in was the religion of themselves,” Brody answered. “Hitler was almost like the god, the figurehead.”
At the end of “Daniel’s Story,” students have a chance to write their reactions on index cards that are later displayed in glass cases.
“Don’t treat people different, because they are the same as you,” one Marina Middle School student wrote in brightly colored marker.
Advised an Asian-American boy: “Be proud of who you are.”
After recording their thoughts, the students talked with Holocaust survivor Vern Drehmel, who was a child during World War II.
“I’m as much Daniel as other survivors my age,” he told them. “I was born in Germany, went to ghettoes and extermination camps and survived.”
Students wanted specifics: What did Drehmel have to eat in the camps? How did the gas chambers work? Did he lose his entire family?
The survivor, a San Mateo resident, spoke warmly and openly with the children, making sure to call them by name. At one point, he rolled up his shirtsleeve to show them the blue prisoner identification number branded on his left arm, a sight that drew astonished gasps from some students.
What would prevent something like the Holocaust from happening in this country? Drehmel asked them.
“Say the president wanted to do something like that,” offered Bryce Vree. “Congress would nail him or the Supreme Court would nail him.”
Responded Drehmel: “That’s right. We are a people under the law.”
But in the end, Drehmel tried to move beyond the specifics of the Holocaust to its universal lessons.
Pointing to his head and his heart, he told the students: “Anyone who thinks knows from here and here what is right and what is wrong. The essential element here is that we must care about each other.”