Speaking About Silence: Eighth-Grader Traces Impact of Jim Crow and Holocaust in Her Family

After taking a Facing History and Ourselves course at her Chicago public school, fourteen-year-old Baylee found she was able to open new conversations within her own family, discovering the influence of both the Holocaust and the Jim Crow era of racial segregation in the lives of her older relatives. The experience also has her thinking about her own future:

“I want to write, to talk, and to share because I know what silence is and how deadly it can be. You see, I come from a long line of people, on both sides of my family, who learned how terrible the world can be when people don’t speak out.”

Baylee C. at the Chicago Facing History and Ourselves 2011 Spring Benefit

My name is Baylee, I’m 14 years old, I’m an eighth grader at the John Pershing West Middle School, and tonight I want to talk to you about silence.

I know that sounds strange. It even sounds a little strange to me, since there’s nothing in the world I want more than to be a writer someday, and maybe a talk show host, just like my idol, Oprah Winfrey. 

I want to write, to talk, and to share because I know what silence is and how deadly it can be. You see, I come from a long line of people, on both sides of my family, who learned how terrible the world can be when people don’t speak out.

My great grandfather on my mother’s side grew up in the Jim Crow south, in Tennessee. No one in my family ever talked about what it must have felt like for him to have been an African American soldier in World War II, fighting for freedom around the world, but not allowed to go to the same schools as his white neighbors, or to drink from the same water fountain when he came home. No one ever discussed how much it must have hurt him, how much it must have hurt them all.

And my grandmother on my father’s side was silent too.

She was my age now, 14, when she and her family had to flee Hitler’s Germany, leaving everything they had behind, all because their last name was Pearlstein, all because they were Jews.

Growing up, my grandmother and my father would talk from time to time about the Holocaust, but it seemed distant and long ago. I felt like it was somebody else’s history. Not mine and even not hers. She would never talk about it with me.

Maybe she was trying to spare me. Maybe she thought that I was too young to understand, even though she was my age when she lived through it.  Maybe it was because she had lived through it when she was a child, and thought that no child should have to experience, even second hand, what she had. 

I never knew what it must have felt like for her to fear her neighbors who were not Jews and were not willing to stand up for her or her family, to be what in Facing History we call “upstanders”. They were silent while millions of their neighbors were rounded up, shipped off, had everything stolen from them, and then murdered. All of it was done in silence.

I was in seventh grade, just starting the Facing History program when I started to realize how much I had not been told. Reading the stories of Holocaust survivors, hearing them speak, made me feel for the first time what my grandmother and six million others like her had suffered.

When, in Facing History, we learned about the Jim Crow laws in the south, and the Little Rock Nine, and others who fought for the rights of African Americans, it made me see what my great grandparents and their children went through in a way I never felt it before. This is something I never want to experience.

Last year my mother and I went down to Tennessee and I got to talk with my great grandmother. And because Facing History had made it real for me, I knew what to ask her. And I knew how to listen.

The lessons I learned from Facing History have also taught me to see the community where I live on the south side in a different way. My neighborhood is diverse, but the different groups don’t really know each other or talk to each other.

And that’s the silence that I want to break as a writer and a talk show host. Facing History helped me understand how to communicate, and that communication is sometimes the most important thing in the world. But is has also taught me that I have something to talk about—my family, my history, and my community.

Thank you for giving me a voice.