News

EHHS students' research has historic significance

By Molly McGowan Gorsuch/Henderson County schools, Published: May 3, 2015

East Henderson High School is making history.

Following a year-long research project that sparked international interest, students will return a Holocaust-era letter to living relatives they located with assistance from Yad Vashem in Israel – the world center for documentation, research, education and commemoration of the Holocaust.

In the spring of 2014, Todd Singer’s American History I & II classes embarked on a journey to find a living relative of Betty Erb, who wrote a plea of help from Berlin in 1939. She had reached out to a John B. Erb in Philadelphia in hopes they were family and he would send money so she and her “intended” could escape Germany and emigrate to Bolivia.

The letter came into Singer’s possession in 2010 as he began taking Holocaust artifacts off the market and collecting them for an exhibit he and his wife donated to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Still in his files, Betty Erb’s letter became a lesson in research, persistence, empathy and the horrors of the Holocaust as his students unfolded Erb’s and others’ experiences while tracing her lineage. Upon discovering that Erb and her husband, Martin Selling, had perished at Auschwitz in 1943, the students vowed to find living relatives and give them Erb’s letter.

In the summer of 2014, local philanthropist Benjamin Warren connected Singer’s class with Shaya Ben Yehuda, managing director of International Relations Division at Yad Vashem. Ben Yehuda said that prior to the students’ research, Erb and Selling were unknown victims of the Holocaust. Now, they have been added to Yad Vashem’s “Hall of Names” Holocaust memorial and the Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names.

Ben Yehuda also commended the East Henderson students’ efforts in finding Erb’s living relatives, and offered Yad Vashem’s vast resources – including researcher Malka Weisberg.

Weisberg collaborated with the International Tracing Service’s world-renowned archival and research center in Bad Arolsen, Germany, and found a living relative of Erb in Perth, Australia, by the name of Andrew Blitz, who connected Singer’s class with his sister, Suzanne Goldberg, in Florida.

Now, more than 75 years after Erb typed her letter – and two days before the 70th anniversary of World War II’s end in Europe – the artifact is being returned to a relative’s hands. In the spirit of preservation, Blitz and Goldberg are in turn gifting Erb’s letter to Shani Lourie, an educator at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies.

The students’ "efforts will be recognized alongside the millions of people, two or more generations beyond the Shoah, who seek to confront the consciousness of the Holocaust, internalize the magnitude of atrocity, understand the inhumanity of genocide, and strive for righteousness,” Blitz said.

As for his family, Blitz said, “We are now able to gift the legacy of remembrance to Betty Erb … When we commemorate the victims of the Holocaust we will incorporate memorial prayers to her, recall her plight, and stand in honor of her testimony. (The students’) gift to us is not just history, but the recovery of memory itself that would otherwise have been lost from our world.”

For his work in connecting East’s students and faculty with Yad Vashem and for his generosity in bringing guests to Hendersonville from out of state and country, Warren is being honored as an “Honorary Eagle” at East Henderson High School.