Clear Lake man changes outlook on life after Holocaust study trip
Published 11:59 am, Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Patrick LeBlanc is still processing what he saw and heard last summer when he was sent to Washington, D.C., Israel and Europe to enhance his ability to teach about the Holocaust.
"It was a very intense trip," said LeBlanc, a volunteer docent and teacher at the museum. "But it was good; it was a very enlightening trip."
LeBlanc, 43, was among educators from around the country who participated in the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers' Program this year. The three-week experience is primarily for U.S. secondary school teachers. It was created to deepen teachers' knowledge and strengthen their ability to implement Holocaust studies.
LeBlanc, a Houston Police Department sergeant with the crime-scene unit, is a trained docent for Holocaust Museum Houston.
He also teaches a museum course, "Law Enforcement in Society: Lessons of the Holocaust."
The optional course for law enforcement officers was developed by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Anti-Defamation League.
LeBlanc said he jumped at the chance to participate in the teachers' program this year with the help of the Lea Krell Weems Fellowship. The fellowship also went to Kathy Day, a history teacher at Navasota High School.
Administered from New York, the program is sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers, The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, The Jewish Labor Committee and the U.S. Holocaust National Museum. Participation costs about $3,000 per person.
"I was very humbled and honored to have the opportunity to participate," said LeBlanc, who was in the program June 30 through July 21.
What made the experience even more touching for LeBlanc was that the fellowship that made his participation possible was funded by the family of the late Lea Krell Weems.
"It was very humbling to go in Lea's name," he said. "She was one of the first Holocaust survivors I met."
Weems was one of thousands of children taken out of concentration camps and hidden from the Nazis during World War II, daughter Judy Mucasey said.
It wasn't until 1981, when Weems took a trip to Israel for former hidden children, that she learned her parents had been killed at the Auschwitz death camp.
"That was a turning point for her," said Mucasey, who lives in Bellaire.
Weems became driven to learn more about her family's history and to educate others about the Holocaust.
She served as a founding member and a longtime president of the Houston Council of Holocaust Survivors.
She also was a founding board member of Holocaust Museum Houston.
Through the survivors group, Weems helped raised money to help send two teachers every year to the summer program that LeBlanc recently attended.
Weems' family created the Lea Krell Weems Fellowship to carry on Weems' efforts to educate others.
The fellowship is funded by Mucasey and her brothers, David, Jeff and Gary Markowitz.
"We feel privileged to help people be part of this program," Mucasey said. "We are so lucky to honor our mother in this way."
The Holocaust & Jewish Resistance Teachers' Program's summer trip started this year at the national Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C.
LeBlanc and the other teachers in the group toured the facility and attended a workshop on how to use artifacts to better convey information. They also heard from Holocaust survivors.
In Israel, the teachers visited Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum and memorial, and toured Jerusalem.
From there, the group went to Germany, where it visited the Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrueck concentration camps, along with the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
For LeBlanc, one of the most affecting sites was a villa outside of Berlin, where Hitler's cabinet members had met.
"They had already decided on the 'Final Solution,' " LeBlanc said.
"To be at this villa, which is a gorgeous, gorgeous villa, and imagine these men sipping brandy and smoking cigars while they planned the murder of an entire people was kind of surreal."
Group members also saw the site that once housed the T4 program, Nazi Germany's large-scale euthanasia program.
One of the women leading the tours is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
"She told us her mother's story. To see her, her reactions to our reactions, really personalized it," LeBlanc said.
He and the teachers traveled by train from Berlin to Krakow, Poland.
The group stopped at several death camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau.
"This was, again, very surreal," LeBlanc said.
"You've seen the photographs and read about it, but the thing that struck me was the sheer size. It's just vast for acres and acres."
Another stop was the site of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The revolt, conducted by civilian Jews, was organized in resistance to Nazi Germany's efforts to transport the remaining ghetto population to the Treblinka concentration camp for extermination.
"There was a lot of focus on this trip on life and survival and how you teach about those things," LeBlanc said.
This journey, LeBlanc said, did more than help him with his teaching. It changed his outlook.
"The impact for me, personally, is not taking anything for granted. None of us are promised tomorrow."