Piecing together peace.

Yesterday, my Literature of the Holocaust class presented “Piecing Together Peace” for the first time. It’s a presentation we’ve been working on for a while now, even though the course ended in January. We’ve continued meeting outside of school, discussing the project through e-mail, and putting everything together on our own time. It took a lot of dedication and proved frustrating at points, but seeing it all come together was extremely gratifying.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll briefly explain the project. We basically turned a room into a work of art that viewers experience as they watch a video that shows acts of hate throughout history. The walls are covered with graffiti containing hateful and discriminatory words, but after the hate video plays, the room transforms from dark to light and the walls become covered with sheets painted instead with words of peace. The video then transitions from acts of hate to acts of love. It’s hard to explain and it’s something you really had to experience, but basically, our goal is to spread a message of hope to our community, showing that love can overcome hate. After seeing the reactions from our audience, I think we’ve accomplished that.

Of course, there were times when a lot of us thought this project wouldn’t happen. Many of us didn’t believe we could pull it off. It got to the point where our class considered electing a delegate to speak with our teacher and gently explain that we simply didn’t have the capacity to complete what we started. But despite the doubts, the disagreements, and some mishaps along the way, it all came together in the end. Every individual person brought their own unique ideas and creativity to the classroom, culminating in a project that we are all extremely proud of and extremely blessed to have been a part of.

After the presentation, one girl came up to me in tears to express her appreciation for all of our efforts. And if she’s the only person at all affected by our work, the project was worth it. Seeing it affect just one person that deeply means it was a complete success, and that we accomplished what we set out to do. At that moment, the meaning of our presentation overshadowed every problematic detail and stressful debate we had along the way.

It’s interesting how after everything we put into that project, our own message didn’t fully hit home for me until I saw how it affected other people. Our presentation showed individual acts of courage in contrast with hate, war and genocide throughout history to prove that one person can make a difference, and ultimately, it was this one student who made the difference in my feelings about this project. If every single student in our school agreed to sign our pledge and stand up to an act of injustice after seeing our presentation, I don’t think it would mean nearly as much as this one student’s reaction.

We all crafted this idea from the start because we wanted and expected it to make an impact, but I don’t think any of us expected such gratification from the project or the response from our community. We certainly didn’t expect it to change our own feelings about our message and about ourselves so much, but the experience has definitely changed us all. When we spoke about peace and individual power and righteousness before, those were all just words. It was all theoretical. But now, we’ve proven it not just to our school, but to ourselves. We’ve never had such faith in our own words and ideas, and we’ve never felt closer to one another. All in all, I think Emily said it the best: “Yes — we complained, argued and struggled — however, I wouldn’t change a thing about our process or presentation. What we’ve done will be remembered for years to come, and I couldn’t be happier.”

For those of you who haven’t come yet, I hope you come next week to our evening presentation. I think you’ll find that the result completely speaks for itself.

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