Holocaust horrors are personal for Jewish student at Catholic school

Published: 2004-04-15

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (CNS) -- Michele Czapnik, a junior at Bishop Kearney High School in Rochester, said she thinks about the Holocaust "all the time." Borderline obsession? Not when your own relatives were among the estimated 6 million people exterminated during World War II. Czapnik's grandparents survived concentration camps, yet many of her other Jewish ancestors in Poland were killed by the Nazis. "I was thinking about it today at the bus stop," Czapnik, 16, said recently. "It was freezing out, and I've seen pictures of (Holocaust) survivors where they were standing in the same temperature with hardly any clothes on. "I wouldn't have lasted a half-hour," she told the Catholic Courier, Rochester diocesan newspaper. "I could never be as strong as any of them. It boggles my mind how people survived this, watching their family get killed in front of their eyes."

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