New Haven Independent

The teens are part of the Hopkins School summer “Breakthrough” program.They came to the memorial Friday to help with a periodic clean-up of the grounds and to learn about the Holocaust in the process. Cardell Walters and his teacher, Dylan Eldridge (pictured), took hoes to the grass overgrowing the six concrete spokes that radiate out from the memorial. Others planted flowers in front of the 18 markers, arranged in a circle around the memorial, that bear the names of concentration camps.

Doris Zelinsky, the memorial association’s president, worked with the Breakthrough Director Michael Van Leesten and her son Nathaniel Zelinsky, who teaches in the program, to get the kids involved at the site. She and Marvin Cohen, who sketched the original design for the memorial more than 30 years ago, talked to the students about the history of the Holocaust and its survivors who immigrated to New Haven.

After working in the hot sun, the students got a more personal account of this history from Endre Sarkany who survived as a child in the Budapest ghetto, while his father was sent to Mauthausen, a German concentration camp, and liberated in 1945. He is pictured here with the memorial’s Mauthausen marker.