NORTH PALM BEACH, Fla. — Chuck Hagy is one of about 20 teachers from Palm Beach County who will return to the classroom this school year with an intimate perspective about the Holocaust.
Hagy has been a history teacher for 35 years and currently works as the Head of Middle School at the Benjamin School.
WATCH BELOW: WPTV's Jamie Ostroff sat down with Chuck Hagy after his trip abroad
WPTV’s Jamie Ostroff sat down with him shortly after returning from a trip across the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden.
“I can say it changed the way that I view myself and my career and my role as a teacher and a school leader,” said Hagy.
He believes getting to walk in the footsteps of the Holocaust and to see what they saw will help bring the lessons of the past into present-day classrooms across Palm Beach County.
“It's the ultimate example of learning by doing,” he said. “The emotions are deep and they're life changing.”
Hagy, like the rest of the group, is an Alfred Lerner fellow through the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous. The group has spent years intensely studying the Holocaust and the curriculum culminates in the trip abroad.
“We had followed the trail of Anne Frank and her sister, Margo, so we had visited the Frank family apartment,” Hagy said. “I was able to see Anne Frank's room where she started her diary.”
“We were able to go to the annex where the Franks hid before they were discovered, and then we ended our day at Bergen Belsen. [That was] the most difficult experience of the trip. We stopped and we prayed.”
Hagy said he felt the heaviness of the tragedy while touring the mass graves at the Bergen Belsen concentration camp.
“If that's not a lesson, then I don't know what is,” he said.
Hagy was also inspired by some of the lesser-known stories of people who took great risks during the Holocaust.
“The rescue of 98% of the Jews of Denmark when the Danish people — Jewish and non-Jewish — worked together to orchestrate a boat lift from the coast of Denmark to the coast of Sweden. It's an amazing story that I can't wait to tell my students.”
The teachers toured buildings in Denmark where Jewish people hid on their way to safety.
“There’s no way to equate being there with the sights [and] with the smells, actually touching the bricks and listening to the scholars unfolding the story in front of us,” said Hagy.
Even though these paths were walked generations ago, Hagy believes they help us look forward as we navigate our own path.
“If we don't study and take these opportunities to discuss this history with our students, we miss out on valuable lessons,” he said. “How are you going to actually participate in your world to create a kinder, more compassionate, more humane place?”