Holocaust survivor tells her story to C-M students

CECIL – Johanna Reiss doesn’t want kids to hate others or draw sweeping stereotypes of whole groups of people.
She should know after spending nearly three years of her young life hiding from Nazi soldiers inside a small house in Holland.
The 81-year-old Holocaust survivor and accomplished author traveled from her home in New York City to tell her story to the fifth- and sixth-grade students at Cecil Intermediate School on Thursday.
“Don’t let anyone do your thinking for you,” Reiss told sixth-graders in the morning assembly. “Promise not to follow anyone who hates.”
She spent 1,000 days in hiding with her sister, Sini, after a family took them in and had them stay upstairs. They would hide in a makeshift closet with a moveable wall whenever soldiers came by to do inspections of the town.
“That’s an awfully long time to be sitting for the only reason that I was born into a Jewish family,” she said.
Melissa Cirincione, a language arts and social studies teacher at Cecil Intermediate, came across her story a couple years ago and assigned her award-winning book “The Upstairs Room” to her class. She had her students write letters to Reiss, who responded to the class. Reiss then offered to travel to the school to tell the students her tale.
“It’s one of those rare moments in teaching that I don’t think I’ll come across it again,” Cirincione said of the visit. “I hope the children understand it and appreciate it.”
Many students had questions, including one boy who asked her why Adolph Hitler hated the Jews. It was a question to which Reiss had no answer.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I have no idea. Why do people hate whole groups?”
Reiss added, though, that she feels the responsibility as a Holocaust survivor to quash hate and make a difference. She pointed to the family who saved her, Johan and Opal, for their courage and humanity. They became her new family after she was separated from her parents – her mother died in the hospital during the war – and her 82-year-old grandmother was sent to a concentration camp.
“They were just ordinary folks who didn’t eat off plates or wear the most fashionable clothes,” shes said. “Would I have taken in someone? I have to be honest. I don’t know.”