Holocaust Impact Video Contest honors survivors, student work

The 3rd Annual Oskar Knoblauch Holocaust Impact Video Contest invites high school and middle school students across Arizona to create three-minute YouTube videos educating viewers about the Holocaust using the personal testimonies of local survivors.

The initiative was created to inspire the next generation to become upstanders, people who speak out and take action in the face of injustice through the powerful act of storytelling.

Zachariah Chief, the third-place winner of the contest, joined “Arizona Horizon” alongside Anthony Fusco, Holocaust Education Director at Arizona Jewish Historical Society.

Fusco discussed the importance of hosting this video contest in Arizona.

“When it comes down to it, it’s a voice for the voiceless,” Fusco said. “For many of our survivors, we have about 70 of them in the Valley, these students are providing them and those that they have lost a chance to educate, to learn about the darkest days of human history.”

Chief wrote poems prior to entering the contest, though he noted his process for creating his entry was different.

“I had to probably like, go in depth in how everything went,” Chief said. “And at the same time, I probably like had to, let’s just say, just like dreaming or something like that. But instead of dreaming you had to imagine it in your own imagination, and I had to search up and how it was. And search how everything happened to the people that the Holocaust survivors had to go through. And, I had to, let’s just say, put myself in the way they felt when they were young.”