When Diane Saltzman, the Museum’s director of Survivor and Council Stewardship, sent me an e-mail to ask me to speak at a program in Ashburn, Virginia, at a schoolhouse that had been defaced with graffiti, I had already heard and read about the historic one-room Ashburn Colored School. The phrase “white power,” swastikas, profanities, and crude drawings were spray painted in black, blue, and red on the outside of the wooden walls and windows. Diane informed me that I was to speak for only a short time with other invited presenters. I accepted the invitation because I wanted to be part of that historic occasion, and I wanted to do something to confront hatred. I did not know where the school was located and what was being or would be done with it.
Ashburn is about a 50-minute drive from my house in Chevy Chase, Maryland. As soon as we exited the highway, we drove through a modern suburban neighborhood with single-family homes and well-kept lawns. It was easy to find the school because on this Sunday morning, there were so many people standing on ladders, painting over the graffiti on the little building that was sitting isolated on a small hill. I found out later that the Loudoun County School for the Gifted had purchased the 123-year-old schoolhouse, a segregated school for black children, and all the land around it. The plan is to use the property to build a state-of-the-art school for middle and high school students and to restore the schoolhouse, which had been built in 1892 and closed in 1957, and convert it into a museum.
The school founder and teachers of the Loudoun School for the Gifted were responsible for this “Community Restoration Celebration—A Testament to Ashburn’s True Spirit, October 9, 2016.” Local businesses donated food, dumpsters, paint, and other supplies. Volunteers shoveled rocks and spread them around the foundation. Many people came to give their muscle power, and many came to support their community by being there. They came with their young children and their teenagers, people of all ages and ethnic backgrounds. The act of vandalism against the schoolhouse was hideous. The Loudoun County police identified five teenagers who had vandalized the schoolhouse. To my great happiness, here were hundreds of people to undo their act of prejudice.
Susan Warsinger presents a Nazi propaganda book aimed at children during her presentation in Ashburn, Virginia. Courtesy of Susan Warsinger
A stage had been set up near the schoolhouse, and most of the people there became our audience. Deep Sran, the founder of the Loudoun School for the Gifted, spoke eloquently about the students of his school and all their efforts to restore the old wooden schoolhouse, which had been standing on a slope and had chipped paint and boarded windows. The students had been working on it for two years. The windows had already been replaced. Phyllis Randall, chair of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, the first African American to hold that title, talked about how the community will rise above this incident. When it was my turn to speak, I was surprised to be introduced as the “distinguished guest speaker.” Diane had explained that I needed to speak for only 10 to 15 minutes, like all the other speakers had.
I told the mixed audience of all ages some of my experiences as a child in Germany, when the Nazis first came into power. I conveyed how distressed I was about the awful images painted on the historic schoolhouse, because those swastikas brought back many disturbing childhood memories. I told the audience that there were swastikas everywhere in Germany. I spoke about my experience in first grade, when the teacher read the picture storybook of Der Giftpilz, which taught the young children that Jews were poisonous mushrooms. I held up a poster of the cover of the book, which our Museum had made for me some time ago (before we had PowerPoint). The audience understood that Nazi propaganda was also aimed at young children. I also told about my experiences in the park, where the gatekeeper called me names and threw rocks at me because I was Jewish. His young daughter saw her father in this act of antisemitism and learned from him about discrimination. I told them about my experiences during Kristallnacht and was happy to learn that some people in the audience had learned about the Night of Broken Glass, which owes its name to the shards of shattered glass that lined German streets from windows of synagogues, homes, and Jewish-owned businesses plundered during the violence.I was so proud of the audience because they seemed to understand what hatred and prejudice can do to people. We remembered the dark chapters in our history and learned from them. Besides remembering, we were taking action to confront hate. All of us were standing there together to counter the intolerable images and words that were written on the schoolhouse.
After the speeches, many of us took pictures of the schoolhouse and the workers who had almost completed painting it. By the time I went home, the schoolhouse stood there, freshly painted and shiny, glowing in the afternoon sun.
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