Kym Harris is neither astronomer nor astronaut, but her eyes are firmly fixed on the stars.
Harris is the New York-based project director of A Letter to the Stars, an educational project uniting 50,000 Austrian students with Austrian-born Holocaust survivors throughout the world.
Since its inception in 2003, the program has created intensely personal relationships between people separated by time, age, religion and bitter history.
The idea first surfaced when Austrian journalists Andreas Kuba and Josef Neumayr collected the names of 80,000 Austrians 65,000 of whom were Jewish who were murdered in the Holocaust.
After publishing an article, the journalists decided to enlist the help of middle and high school students in Austria to research the victims biographical information.
Sometimes all they had was the date of birth, date of death and the last known address, Harris says.
The journalists established a website where students could volunteer as researchers and the response was overwhelming.
Thousands upon thousands of students stormed the archives, says Harris.
Kuba and Neumayr called the project A Letter to the Stars in honor of Gypsy painter Karl Stojka, who, as a boy in Auschwitz, saw Jews being marched to the crematorium. At night, Stojka dreamed of seeing them dead, in the night, as yellow stars in heaven.
Soon students amassed more than research. They exchanged e-mails, photos and letters with the victims family members often Holocaust survivors themselves.
For the past five years, survivors have traveled to Austria to meet their young pen pals, teach the Holocaust in the schools and receive overdue honors from their native land.
The majority had not set foot in Austria since the Holocaust.
Students also went to New York, London and Israel to visit survivors on their own turf.
At the conclusion of these gatherings, students and survivors share tears of authentic affection, and hope.
Harris, who moved to Vienna in 2002 and soon joined A Letter to the Stars as a facilitator and translator, has witnessed the programs ability to transform youthful hearts.
While it all began with the students they were brave enough to break the taboos, break the silence, and go forth so naively and honestly into the program the effects have spread throughout society, she says.
The students are not trying to reclaim the glory of an individual survivor.
They are reclaiming an open inquiry into their own past.
Harris, the daughter of Denverites Howard and Michele Harris and granddaughter of Jerry and Leona Harris, is passionate about Holocaust education.
Her current project, Ambassadors of Remembrance, is based on A Letter to the Stars.
Ambassadors of Remembrance would expand the successful pairing of students and Holocaust survivors to such countries as Poland, Holland and Ukraine.
Dr. Elazar Barkan, co-director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation and a professor at Columbia University, has agreed to oversee the initiative once funding is secured.
Ambassadors of Remembrance is based on the premise that personal relationships between students and survivors result in a form of reconciliation that eludes conventional educational models.
Thats why A Letter to the Stars has proven so successful, Harris says.
If the idea is never to forget, but also to instill a sense of social justice, hope, and not just memory, then I know this works.
Harris, who was active in Denver Stepping Stones to a Jewish Me, Shwayder Camp, Shai Camp, IST and taught music at Temple Emanuel, graduated from the University of Redlands in 2001.
One year later, she was in Vienna the glittering city that over the centuries has inspired music, art, architecture, literature, psychoanalysis and anti-Semitism.
For decades after WW II ended, Austria denied its complicity in the Holocaust.
In 1996, the government finally instituted Holocaust curriculum in the schools and admitted Austria shared culpability in the Shoah.
Unfortunately, no one really knew how to teach the Holocaust.
People had been working on a grassroots level to include Holocaust education in the schools, Harris says. But from my personal experience as a teacher in Austria, it was very much up to the individual school and teacher.
The Holocaust can be a half-hour lesson or an ongoing project which teachers involved in A Letter to the Stars have encouraged.
The point is, teachers did not know how to teach the Holocaust. Many tried. Others didnt care.
Harris, who earned an MA in humanities and social thought from NYU in 2007, feels that the situation is improving.
Theres a Catholic teachers college in Vienna that is educating people how to teach the Holocaust, she says. Its part of the human rights curriculum. And survivors who came to Austria with A Letter to the Stars helped train those teachers.
Dealing with Austrias role in the Holocaust remains touchy, she admits.
Anti-Semitism persists, as the does the attitude that what happened 65 years ago is irrelevant to the present.
However, a series of public events hosted by A Letter to the Stars has internalized, and elevated, the significance of the Holocaust in Austria, Harris says.
She breathlessly cites examples.
On May 5, 2003, in one of the first public memorials, about 10,000 students gathered in Viennas Heldenplatz. Prominent Austrian personalities, students, Holocaust survivors and their families delivered speeches.
Then students took personal letters they wrote in memory of each victim, attached them to white balloons and released them over the city. The letters were published in the book, A Letter to the Stars: Students Write History.
For several years, students and Austrian survivors have attended annual tributes marking the liberation of Mauthausen concentration camp. They have held all night vigils, lit 100,000 memorial candles and planted 100,000 sunflowers for the victims.
Flowers of Remembrance, a two-day event held May 4-5, 2006, began at St. Stephans Cathedral Square. The names of Austrias Holocaust victims were projected on a giant screen made of white roses.
The following day, 25,000 students took a white rose bearing the name of each victim and put it in the doorway of his or her last known address in Vienna.
There were 80,000 roses, Harris says. Vienna was covered in flowers.
Large memorial activities were held as recently as May, 2008. Future events are in the planning stages.
Initially, Harris worked in New York as a support person for Holocaust survivors involved in A Letter to the Stars.
No one ever refused to go back to Austria, Harris says, but for a few survivors, working through their emotions took up to a year.
A fair number of students were already writing to them, so the relationships had been established. This contact helped considerably.
Pairing survivors with the right schools in Vienna involved careful planning.
One man who had a particularly troubled history and hard life was paired with a school of kids who had particularly hard lives, Harris recalls. They bonded immediately.
If we had lived at the same time, we would have been best friends, he said after meeting them.
When the schools that survivors attended before they were forced to leave still existed, they were paired with those schools.
Survivors who studied a particular area like fashion design were paired with fashion design schools.
The people involved in the program are all so different, Harris says. The schools are all different, ranging from university-bound high schools to tiny village schools where some of the kids have never been on an airplane, or even to Vienna.
Students wrote plays about their experiences with Holocaust survivors. They created original artwork in their honor and sent them special gift packages.
One survivor was an avid soccer player, Harris says. A student dug up grass seeds from the soccer field in Vienna where the survivor once played and mailed them to his home in America.
Very creative relationships were born.
A longstanding debate rages among Holocaust survivors. Some believe it is possible to enter into reconciliation with their persecutors children and grandchildren.
Others find the very suggestion abhorrent.
Harris has no doubt that A Letter to the Stars has brought about an element of genuine healing, at least between survivors and the younger generation.
But she understands the aching dilemma.
Reconciliation is an active process, not an end, she says. Its not even a goal. It is a process with many levels. Reconciliation means a general forgiveness. It does not mean any kind of forgetting.
To ask someone to abstractly feel reconciled to a country that has done you incredible wrong, that has tried to murder you or killed your family you cant expect that without some kind of active process. It requires a personal journey.
Before A Letter to the Stars, Harris says Holocaust survivors were regarded as the existential other abstract numbers; people who were expelled from society that nobody knew anything about.
Now they are flesh and blood human beings.
Students are welcoming survivors not only physically back to Austria but to their own communities and rightful place in history, she says.
These students finally are able to integrate all the people who disappeared from their country long ago into their present identity.
Information: www.lettertothestars.at or [email protected].
