By Jason Wesseldyk
Sports Editor
The Top 10 finalists for the Henry Pestka Art & Poetry Contest were recently announced.
Plainwell High School student Laura Groner was included in that group for her painting “I Will Remember.”
Groner and the other finalists will be featured in an art exhibit at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids.
The theme of the contest was “Never Forget.”
“Laura is an outstanding and talented young lady,” PHS principal Jeremy Wright said. “She is an excellent representative and we couldn’t be more proud of her accomplishments.
“I was pleased to hear that Laura was named a finalist in the Henry Pestka Art & Poetry Contest because now other people can see the great students we have at PHS.”
The top three finalists will be announced as part of an awards ceremony at Meijer Gardens in May. Groner plans to attend the ceremony with PHS teacher Julie Trahan, who had Groner as a student in Holocaust Literature I and II, among other classes.
“I am so proud of Laura,” Trahan said. “I was so impressed with not only her artwork, but with her artist’s statement as well. What she wrote was so profound that I was not surprised that she was chosen as a finalist.”
The contest was presented by the West Michigan Holocaust Partnership and named in honor of Henry Pestka, a Holocaust survivor. The contest was open to sixth-through-12th-grade students who completed the Michigan state requirement on Holocaust education, with a goal of providing those students “the opportunity to process and reflect on the concepts they learned through writing or art.”
“All too often, images of the Holocaust we remember are those created by the perpetrators,” the Pestka family said in a release. “We see people humiliated, starved and beaten, dressed in rags or tawdry striped uniforms, robbed of their humanity. If our study of the Holocaust ends there, we victimize these people a second time.
“But when we engage survivor testimonies or memoirs, we come to see those targeted by the Nazis as individuals, meeting them as people who gave and received love and for whom the memory of those they loved was a source of extraordinary strength. Love nourished their soul and sometimes inspired hope.
“Though the Holocaust was a painfully tragic time in human history, there were everyday people who acted heroically, even when facing the most hopeless situations. Whether it was a Jewish prisoner who aided other victims, righteous gentiles who sheltered the Jews, or local people who spoke out, there were glimmers of hope in an otherwise terrible time.”
Groner created “I Will Remember” using acrylic paints and a black marker for the writing and smaller details, such as the eyes and the dots inside the white flowers.
In her artist statement, Groner described her painting:
“The painting includes two young people hugging; the woman representing a pre-war Jewish person who is wearing an everyday dress as well as a present-day middle-aged black man embracing her.
“The words ‘I will remember’ encompass the two individuals in multiple different languages. From left to right the languages are: French, German, Spanish, English, Yiddish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
“Most of these languages I choose at random and either knew myself or had friends help to translate into ‘I will remember.’ However, I specifically included Yiddish because it is a language that is/was spoken by many Jewish individuals throughout Europe-especially before the Holocaust.”
Groner pained the Jewish woman in an everyday dress as opposed to a concentration-camp uniform because she wanted to convey the fact that victims of the Holocaust had lives before “being stripped of their rights as human beings.”
“By choosing to dress the woman in clothes that a Jewish woman would be likely to wear before the Holocaust, I wanted to represent the woman and all others affected by the Holocaust as themselves, not adorned in Nazi regulated uniforms that served to strip them of their humanity,” Groner said in her statement.
The man in the painting is supposed to represent someone in the present day. Whether or not he is Jewish makes little difference, according to Groner.
“Regardless of if the viewer sees the man as a Jewish individual or not, the painting is meant to represent the theme ‘Never Forget’ by showing two people from different time periods and backgrounds coming together to share the pain.
“It is important to grieve together as fellow human beings in order to never forget past and present tragedies. Only when humans see each other as humans, and not ‘them’ and ‘us,’ will we be able to prevent tragedies from occurring.”
Trahan said her Holocaust Literature classes focus on non-fiction stories of victims.
“Through these stories and the context in which they take place, students learn that the Holocaust was not inevitable,” Trahan said “Individuals and organizations made choices that allowed mass murder to occur. We look at the motivations of those choices, the effect of those choices and the impact of antisemitism and hatred. We look at the role of bystanders, and how students can be upstanders in their own lives.
“There are so many facets of Holocaust education, and her statement embodies these concepts and inspires hope and change. Laura’s piece truly represents what many of our students and staff believe.”