“We hope that our students who visit this exhibit will afterwards have a better understanding of this history and perhaps identify with other young people who have suffered and are still suffering from oppression,” he said.
As part of his presentation, Newborn talks about individuals risking their lives today in an effort to fight for human rights. He cited the example of Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani student known for her educational and women’s rights efforts who was shot in the head and neck in an assassination attempt by Taliban gunmen on October 9, 2012, while returning home on a school bus.
History shows that despite the executions, White Rose leaflets made their way throughout Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe, were smuggled into Switzerland and Sweden, and from there were sent to London.
“Once they reached the West,” Newborn writes in his book, “the leaflets of the White Rose were reprinted – now in the tens of thousands – and dropped from Allied aircraft over the cities of Germany.”
In the foreword to Newborn’s book, the late author Studs Terkel wrote, “Whenever I see a white rose, I think immediately of those two [execution victims, Hans and Sophie Scholl], and of their heroism amidst the horror. They let us know that even in Nazi Germany there were some among the young, however few in number, who represented the best that there was in the world.”
White Rose members Hans and Sophie Scholl, as well as Christoph Probst, were executed on Feb. 22, 1943. Alexander Schmorell and Professor Kurt Huber were killed on July 13 that year, and Willie Graf on Oct. 12.
(JNS)