‘A Night with a Survivor’: Rival high school students set aside differences to learn about the Holocaust

RIGBY — Over a hundred students and community members gathered in the Rigby High School Auditorium earlier this week for a conversation with Holocaust survivor and diarist Peter Feigl. His wartime journal is featured in the acclaimed collection “Salvaged Pages.”

Hosted through a growing collaboration between educators in Madison and Jefferson counties, the event brought together students from Rigby High School, Madison High School, BYU-Idaho and community members of all ages to hear Feigl now 97, recount his experiences surviving Nazi-occupied Europe as a Jewish child separated from his parents during World War II.

The journal of a survivor

Fiegl, who joined the event via video call, told the group he was first indoctrinated to hate Jews as a child growing up in Germany. That was before discovering that he, himself, was a Jew labeled one under Nazi racial laws.

Forced to flee from Austria to Belgium, and then through war-torn France, Fiegl endured refugee camps, hunger, constant fear and the arrest and disappearance of his parents, who were later murdered in Auschwitz.

Alone at 13 years old, he survived only because courageous strangers — Quakers, Catholic caretakers, Protestant villagers, resistance members and ordinary civilians — repeatedly chose to protect him at great personal risk.

Throughout his ordeal, Fiegl kept diaries recording his daily life and fears, believing he would someday reunite with his parents and show them he had “behaved as they would have expected.”

Decades later, after recovering one of those diaries, Fiegl transformed his painful memories into a warning about how hatred is taught. Ordinary people can become complicit in evil, he teaches, and history can repeat itself when injustice goes unchallenged.

More than a Holocaust testimony, his story has become a moral appeal to “do the right thing” when others are targeted or persecuted.

Inspiring the rising generation

For many in attendance, the event was more than a history lesson. It became a discussion about empathy, civic responsibility and confronting hatred in the modern world as audience members filed to the front to ask Fiegl questions about his trying experiences.

“It was amazing how open and excited he was to answer all the questions,” said Hannah Mecham, a junior from Madison who attended the event. “He believes everyone already knows right from wrong deep inside, and we have to actively choose to do good and not hate people.”

Mecham asked Feigl whether he sees warning signs today that could lead to future genocides. She said his answer resonated deeply.

“He talked about how genocides have happened since the Holocaust, like in Cambodia and Rwanda,” Mecham said. “He basically said we have to choose not to hate each other, because these things could happen again if we don’t choose differently.”

She said studying the Holocaust has changed the way she views everyday behavior and rhetoric.

“Genocides never start with, ‘Let’s kill everybody,’” she said. “They start with othering people — saying these people are different than us, less than us. That escalates. In the world today, I still see hateful things and racist jokes, and that scares me because that’s how the Holocaust started.”

The Eastern Idaho Holocaust Cohort

The event itself came together largely through the efforts of educator Macy Smith, a former student involved in the Eastern Idaho Holocaust Cohort, a group of teachers intent on expanding Holocaust education throughout east Idaho.

Smith explained that her involvement began years earlier after reading “Salvaged Pages” as a high school junior. Inspired by the book, she wrote to editor Alexandra Zapruder, without expecting a response.

“She wrote back, and we’ve been talking for almost 11 years,” Smith said. “She started sending books to my students, and eventually the students wanted to talk to a Holocaust survivor.”

Smith reached out again and eventually connected with Feigl himself.

“That’s how we ended up here,” she said. “My message is just to always reach out to people. You never know what experiences are going to happen.”

Smith and other educators will soon travel to Europe alongside fellow teachers as part of continuing Holocaust education efforts, including visits to locations associated with stories featured in “Salvaged Pages.”

Rigby High School teacher Larryn Johnson, also a member of the EIHC, has taught for 29 years and currently teaches Holocaust studies. He described the evening as a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

“(Peter Fiegl) is legendary,” Johnson said. “He’s one of the most legendary Holocaust speakers still out there talking. He’s 97 years old, and for this to come together so quickly was incredible.”

He emphasized that Feigl’s humanity stood out as much as his historical significance.

“When he started joking and being human, people realized he wasn’t just this historical icon,” Johnson said. “He talked about love, respect and kindness. People got to see he’s a real person.”

Kerry Thomas, also a Rigby High teacher and EIHC member, says Holocaust education is less about memorizing dates and more about developing empathy and civic awareness.

“It’s all about the individual story,” Thomas said. “Students will never fully understand what it was like, but they can begin to empathize.”

He believes Holocaust education helps students become what he calls “upstanders” — people willing to intervene when they encounter hatred or discrimination.

“It’s the right thing to do,” Thomas said. “When students see something wrong, they should feel empowered to say, ‘We don’t do that here.’”

Bridging the rivalry between Madison and Jefferson

Educators involved with the program say the collaboration between traditionally rival communities has been one of the project’s unexpected successes.

Johnson noted that Madison and Rigby students not only attended together but engaged respectfully with one another throughout the evening.

“In eastern Idaho, people know our communities haven’t always gotten along,” Johnson said, in reference to the fierce high school sports rivalry between the two counties. “But events like this remind us there’s something bigger and more important.”

Organizers say the work will continue this fall with another public Holocaust education event planned for Nov. 11 at the Idaho Falls Library. The event is expected to include a screening of “I’m Still Here” — an MTV-produced adaptation connected to “Salvaged Pages” — followed by another virtual discussion with Zapruder.

For many who attended, however, the strongest takeaway from the evening was simple.

“Speak up,” Mecham said. “That’s how you stop hate before it grows.”