News

Students' research personalizes a Holocaust victim

Breeana Clayton and Maria Morova read Betty Erb's letter.

By Bill Moss, Published: May 13, 2015

A law professor who always wanted to be a high school history teacher, history students who caught the detective bug, a Florida philanthropist and a letter shedding light on one life among 6 million deaths came together to make history.

On Thursday morning at East Henderson High School, students, teachers, administrators, a U.S. congressman, Holocaust researchers and the descendants of Holocaust victims celebrated the commitment that led to the tracing of a letter from a woman desperately hoping to escape Germany in 1939. The help never came. The letter writer, Betty Erb, and her husband, Martin Selling, were murdered at Auschwitz.
The story of Erb’s letter began with Todd Singer, a former adjunct professor of law.
“I always wanted to teach high school kids history,” he said. “I enjoy it a lot more.”
Singer, who has family members who died in the Nazi camps and has an interest in Holocaust history, had acquired the letter for $20 in 1999 and was curious about its author.
East principal Scott Rhodes urged the students to open their eyes and hearts to what was about to transpire on stage of the school the auditorium
“When I challenge you and when I say you can change the world here’s an example (of how) one school, a small school in Western North Carolina, can make a difference in the lives of not just a few people but thousands and thousands of lives. I want you to take in the history that’s being made.”

Appeal for help

Erb wrote the letter to a John B. Erb in Philadelphia hoping to receive help to emigrate to Bolivia.
“In the case that there is no relationship between us, I however implore you to help me in some way, even though you may perhaps have another religion,” she wrote. “I assure you that by your help you would support people whose only hope is to find kind hearts to assist them to build up their existence in a foreign country. I trust that in later times we shall be able to thank you in another way for any kindness you will show to us.”
Students in Singer’s History I and History II classes would soon become curious, too.
“It was a transformative moment for our students here at East,” Singer said. “This document is not a faded relic at the past but is a living testament to mass genocide. East’s students were feeling history, and history can be very painful.”
The students vowed to learn more about Betty Erb and to search for surviving relatives.
Enter Benjamin Warren, a philanthropist and founding chairman of the Holocaust Museum Houston. When the two met last year, Singer told Warren about Betty Erb’s letter.
“It all happened because of Mr. Warren saying, ‘I think I can find a relative for you,’” the history teacher said.

“I get such great joy out of connecting dots and I think this is a perfect example of connecting dots,” Warren said. “It shows the power of every single person having the ability to choose the world and bring something like this to a fruition. My parents both were survivors. My father died when I was eight years old. He was in Auschwitz. My mother’s still alive. She was in a women’s camp that did all those awful experiments on women. They came to Houston to start a business and I guess I’m the byproduct of that.”

‘You gave the name a face’

Through Warren, the East students connected with the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. A researcher there found a living relative of Erb in Perth, Australia. The relative, Andrew Blitz, connected Singer’s class with his sister, Suzanne Goldberg, in Florida. Along with her daughter, Shira, Goldberg accepted the letter from EHHS students Breeana Clayton and Maria Morova. Goldberg presented it to Shani Lourie, who will enter it into the archives of the Holocaust studies center.
“You gave the name a face, you gave the name a meaning,” Lourie told the history students.
“This story that you heard is for you part of history and part of living history,” Warren told the students. “For me it’s part of my DNA.”
It’s part of Singer’s DNA, too. For his work, he was rewarded with a fellowship to study in Israel this summer.
“Most of the folks in my family that perished in the Holocaust were from Russia, Eastern Europeans,” he said. “I have a love and passion for teaching the history, and I grew up in a Jewish community in Oklahoma where many of my friends’ parents were Holocaust victims.”
The story of Betty Erb’s letter will live on, and may lead to other discoveries that identify Holocaust survivors.
“I’m going to be teaching this lesson plan because we want other schools to be able to access these types of documents, which they can, and (experience) what these students witnessed,” he said. “I’ve been awarded — I’m very humbled by it — a scholarship to go to Israel for the month of July and to study at a symposium with about 40 teachers from around the world.”
Rhodes presented Warren with a crystal Eagle and named him an “Honorary Eagle” and an honorary East High graduate.
At the symposium Warren funds, students confront “a representation — a triangle — with three words — perpetrator, bystander, rescuer,” he said. “So I charge you today, as you leave here, as you take this experience, to decide what role you want to play. I submit that the role of rescuer is the role that each of you, individually, can take to change the world and make it a better place.”