Students at a school in Southern California had been photographed giving a Nazi salute while standing in front of several dozen red cups arranged in the shape of a swastika. The photos, shared widely on social media last weekend, provoked widespread outrage.
On Thursday, Schloss, 89, found out just what those teenagers were thinking. The answer, it turns out, is that they weren’t.
“I think they really didn’t think about the consequences, but I think they have learned a lesson for life,” Schloss, who has been on a tour of the United States for several weeks speaking out about the dangers of prejudice, told reporters at a news conference Thursday after a private meeting with the students.
Her stepsister, Anne Frank, was 15 years old when she died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany in 1945. Soon after the end of World War II, her father, Otto, published her diary, which went on to become one of the world’s best-known books. One of its most famous lines is “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. “
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Schloss said the controversy showed that education about the Holocaust is still lacking, a fact that the school — Newport Harbor High School in Orange County — seems to understand.
“I think this school has got the message and I hope the state will have got the message and from now on things are going to be improved,” she said.
Photos from the party were widely shared on social media last weekend, prompting officials from the school and school district to hold an emergency meeting Sunday.
On Monday, Katrina Foley, the mayor of Costa Mesa, one of the two cities served by the school, released a statement saying there was “no place” for hateful imagery in the community and that even “normalizing these symbols as a joke is dangerous.” At school that day, students wore blue as a show of solidarity with the Jewish community.
That night, hundreds of people packed into an auditorium at Newport Harbor High School for a community meeting where they heard from students, a rabbi and the spokeswoman for a local Jewish organization.
The school has already interviewed more than two dozen students in its ongoing investigation into the party, it said in a statement.
In an interview Thursday, Sean Boulton, the school’s principal, told The Associated Press that “society as a whole has normalized hate language and hate speech.” The students, he added, “got caught up in a larger national issue.”
In fact, various reports suggest that hateful speech and activity are on the rise.
According to a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center last month, the number of hate groups in the United States rose for the fourth year in a row in 2018. That is in line with a rise in hate crimes, which have increased nationwide in each of the three latest years for which FBI data is available. Early data indicate that reports of hate crimes in New York City are on the rise this year, too.
White supremacist groups have increasingly used propaganda on college campuses to spread racist and anti-Semitic messages in an attempt to recruit new members, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
In the past week alone, swastikas were found spray-painted on a trail in Milwaukee and displayed by students at an assembly at an elite private school in Washington. Last month, two 12-year-olds covered a playground in Queens with swastikas and anti-Semitic graffiti as well.
To Paul Nussbaum, president of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, episodes like the one documented in the photos from last weekend are the result of a failure of leadership — of parents, teachers and community leaders not doing enough to keep prejudice at bay.
“The safety rails are not working,” he said. “We don’t have leaders that are shaming this type of thought and behavior back into the shadows where it belongs.”
The museum, about 50 miles northwest of Newport Harbor High School, is planning to host students, parents and officials from the district for an upcoming private tour at which they’ll meet with a Holocaust survivor and hear perspectives from Nussbaum, who is the son of Holocaust survivors, and the museum’s executive director, who is the grandchild of Holocaust survivors.
Educating students is a central part of the museum’s mission, he said. Last year, nearly a quarter of its approximately 63,000 visitors were students, he said.
The key to educating young people about the Holocaust, according to Nussbaum, is to focus on the personal.
“The Holocaust is one family by one family by one family’s personal, private tragedy,” he said.
Schloss was a teenager herself when she endured her personal tragedy. She was freed from Auschwitz at 16 years old only to find out that her father and brother had died, she said Thursday.
“I was their age when I realized my life has completely shattered — I will never have a family again,” she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.