Two Lakeview Teams Qualify For NHD Nationals With WW2 Projects
Two Lakeview Teams Qualify For NHD Nationals With WW2 Projects
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David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
Two Lakeview Teams Qualify For NHD Nationals With WW2 ProjectsEditor’s note: This is the eighth and last in a series of stories about Warsaw Community Schools students who advanced to National History Day national competition June 9-13 at the University of Maryland’s campus in College Park, Md.
Two Lakeview Middle Schools teams that advanced to the National History Day national competition have projects on events surrounding World War II.
Eighth-graders Hannah Bradford and Grace Friedberg placed first in the junior group exhibit at state with their project “Japanese Internment Camps: Our Homeland Tragedy.”
Edward Robison, Noah Knepp and fellow eighth-grader Phoenix Klein took second at state with “Welcome Back to D-Day” to qualify, but due to scheduling conflicts will not participate at nationals next month.
NHD offers year-long academic programs that engage over half a million middle and high school students around the world annually in conducting original research on historical topics of interest. The largest NHD program is the NHD Contest that encourages students to conduct historical research on a topic of their choice. Students enter these projects at the local and state levels, with top students advancing to the national contest at the University of Maryland. The theme this year is “Triumph and Tragedy.”
Internment Camps
This is the first year Friedberg and Bradford participated in NHD and advanced to nationals.
Bradford said their exhibit is on the Japanese internment camps during World War II.
“The reason we chose this project is because we felt very strongly about the lack of knowledge about this tragedy,” she said.
Friedberg said, “I learned it was all along the West Coast, most of them. They were sent there because, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the United States government felt insecure and so they wanted to separate them from everybody else. That way they could feel safer.”
Bradford said finding information was easy as there’s a lot of books and documentation about the camps.
She said the internment camps don’t really compare to the Nazi concentration camps during World War II.
“The Japanese internment camps were definitely more humane, not entirely, but they were more. They paid them to work. They gave them housing. They gave them beds. The internment camps in Germany were death camps. They killed them and treated them horribly,” she said.
The internment camps were more about containment, while the concentration camps were about death and abuse, she continued.
Bradford said she was “sad learning about it, that we were so hypocritical. That while we were fighting the camps in Germany, we had our own camps right here on our homeland.”
Friedberg said it was a “really big disappointment in how we treated them.”
Bradford said doing the project changed their perspective “on the United States and how we treat people because we see it as a safe haven for everyone, and then we see this as it takes people away from their families, from their jobs, from their normal lives and puts them in camps based on their race.”
Friedberg compared it to how President Donald Trump is building a wall between the United States and Mexico.
“I never thought about it before we started this project. But now seeing how we’re separating them, it’s quite similar and I’m paying more attention to that,” Bradford said.
Back To D-Day
Robison said their performance, “Welcome Back to D-Day,” consists of two mini acts.
“One of which zooms in on the every-day man soldier as he fights in the battle against Nazi Germany. Act II zooms out a little bit on the interactions and how the battle will affect the world afterward,” he said.
Knepp said at the state contest it was about 9½ minutes. The limit for performances is 10 minutes.
“They take a huge topic and condense that, and that’s why I think the judges were so impressed,” said Amanda Scroggs, Lakeview media specialist. “... He’s like the every-day man, every-day soldier perspective, and then (Winston) Churchill and (Dwight) Eisenhower.”
In the first act, Knepp said there are two soliders fresh off D-Day. They are playing cards and talk about themselves and what they’ve done.
“But at the same time we do that, we have to throw out our research with what we’re saying,” he said.
The second act features performances of Klein as Churchill, British prime minister, and Knepp as Eisenhower, an American Army general and future president. Knepp said in their performance Eisenhower writes a letter to Churchill and then Churchill responds to it.
Robison plays a soldier and kind of the narrator throughout the piece.
“It gave, at least for me, a huge, huge, huge appreciation for what these soldiers did as they decided to go out in the field and fight for our country and fight for our freedom in general,” Robison said.
When reading about events like World War II in a textbook, he said there’s no real emotional feeling. Doing this project – and reading personal accounts of men who served during the war at the Old Kosciusko County Jail Museum – were eye-openers.
