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Kings Mountain High’s Miriam Izbicki-Wilson taught incredible class on the Holocaust By Alan Hodge School may be over for this year, but the lessons KMHS students learned in Miriam IzbickiWilson’s class on the Holocaust will stay with them for the rest of their lives. If anyone’s qualified to teach a class on the Holocaust, IzbickiWilson is it. That’s because, in addition to being an innovative educator, she has a unique link to the Holocaust of WWII that saw the Nazis kill 6 million Jews. “My connection to Holocaust education is very personal to me and to my family,” she says. “My grandfather from Lodz, Poland, was a Holocaust survivor who lost his first family at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. He survived imprisonment and was eventually liberated from Ebensee concentration camp.” Ebensee was a forced labor camp in the Austrian mountains. People sent there were made to dig tunnels where the Nazis planned to build V2 rockets. The camp was liberated in May, 1945 by the U.S. Army. “After the war, he spent time in displaced persons camps in Austria and later Italy before immigrating to the United States with his wife, my grandmother Rosa, along with my father Hyman and my aunts Golda and Lina,”
KMHS teacher Miriam Izbicki-Wilson points to a photo of her grandfather Abraham Izbicki who was a Holocaust survivor.
KMHS student Nathaniel Kaiser and the poster he created for the Holocaust class. (Photos by Alan Hodge)
Some of the model Holocaust memorial dioramas that Izbicki-Wilson’s student created. Uzbicki-Wilson said. “The family
Chloe Gregory (left) and Lila Ford co-created this Holocaust poster.
first spent time in Chicago before eventually settling in Sioux City, Iowa.” Even though she was just 11 years old when her grandfather died in Sioux City, his story found a place in her heart. “Growing up, my grandfather almost never talked about what happened to him during the Holocaust,” she said. “Like many survivors, he carried that trauma quietly. Before he passed away in 1989, he shared very little about his experiences, and for a long time, there were many unanswered questions about our family history. Over the last several years, I have spent a great deal See HOLOCAUST, Page 2
Shiloh Bridges points to her Holocaust class poster.
Izbicki-Wilson looks at documentation she has researched about her grandfather’s Holocaust and post-Holocaust experiences.
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