Mouth of the River

Hundreds of students and staff watch carefully as Kati (Kah-tee) Preston is wheeled toward the lone desk center stage. The concert hall, moments ago alive with casual conversation, falls silent.  

    On Friday, February 14^th, participating Oyster River High School (ORHS) classes went to the middle school to join the eighth grade (‘29) in hearing from Preston, a Holocaust survivor. It’s not often that Oyster River students get the chance to learn about history from people who lived through it.  

    The idea to invite a holocaust survivor to speak began in September with Gabrielle Anderson’s Genocide in the Modern World class. This was the second semester the class ran, and she knew she wanted to incorporate more speakers into the curriculum. In the past she had helped to bring in Rwandan Genocide survivors to speak at her previous school and valued how her students were able to connect to the topic.  Anderson said, “I think it humanizes things. I think sometimes people know about something but the humanization of what happened, I think that piece is often missing we’re often detached from it.”  

    Libby Bessette (‘27) heard Preston speak with her US History class and enjoyed hearing from the perspective of someone who was a child while experiencing the Holocaust. Preston was five years old at the time and wasn’t aware when she first started feeling the effects of prejudice. “I learned a lot about how bad it was. I think one of the big things I remember is she said that they had to wear those stars, and she just thought, ‘oh, I’m wearing a star. That’s so cool’, but then somebody spit on it, she thought, ‘why doesn’t he like stars?’”  

    Hearing someone’s firsthand perspective lets you into the experience in a way that other lessons can’t. “The beauty of history is the primary source. I think it allows you to really engage in it differently than if you are just reading an article,” Anderson says. She noted that there is value in books and readings but hearing those stories from someone who lived them is an invaluable experience, and an opportunity we won’t have forever.  

    Putting this together and hearing Preston’s story, Valerie Wolfson, an eighth-grade social studies teacher, shared something she hoped students would take away from the experience. “I want to encourage students to be independent thinkers and to remain in touch with their own personal ethics and the importance of community care. Kati [Preston] is a tremendous success story as a result of that community care and people who broke the rules and stood up for human life.” 

    Preston lost nearly her entire family in the Holocaust, but she went onto build her own family with her four children and many grandchildren, as well as attending school in Paris, mastering eight languages, and becoming a successful journalist and fashion designer in New York, and London. 

    And even so, she explains that she found her true passion in speaking about her experiences. “I finally found my reason for being alive. I am a public speaker in schools, colleges, churches, museums, anywhere people are willing to hear my story,” Preston says in the final paragraph of her graphic novel, detailing her experiences during that time.  

Now a full-time educational speaker, Preston is invited to fifty to seventy schools a year, sharing her story. She will likely return next year, since Anderson and the other students and staff had such a positive experience. “I do think that you can read about it, you can watch a movie on it, but when you actually hear somebody who survived it, I think it’s just really powerful.” 

– Elise Bacon

photo credit: Gen Brown