By Anna Guido
Enquirer contributor

A videoconference linking students from Cincinnati and California was held at Hebrew Union College on Wednesday. The award-winning book Hana's Suitcase was discussed. (Michael E. Keating photo) | ZOOM |

CLIFTON - In life, Hana Brady was a young girl from Nove Mesto, Czechoslovakia, who enjoyed ice skating, skiing and drawing pictures.

In death, her short life inspired an award-winning children's book about the Holocaust.

Just a few years ago, Hana was unknown. That was before an artifact - Hana's suitcase - was loaned to the Children's Holocaust Education Center in Tokyo by the museum at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland.

Repeated questions from Japanese children about the suitcase - which bears the words: Hana Brady, born May 16, 1931, Waisenkind - are what prompted the Tokyo education center's curator, Fumiko Ishioka, to seek more information about its owner.

On Wednesday, more than 200 middle-school students in Cincinnati and Los Angeles gathered for a videoconference to discuss the book that chronicles Ishioka's journey and what she learned of Hana Brady's life.

The event marks the regional launch of the book, Hana's Suitcase (Albert Whitman and Co., 2003), which was released this year in the United States.

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Come February, other local schools will be able to participate in educational programming using Hana's Suitcase. A framework for teacher training workshops and book distributions is being constructed, said Dr. Racelle Weiman, director of Cincinnati's Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education. Weiman said Hana Brady's brother, George Brady, will be on hand to speak to students, and that schools will be asked to collaborate on the project. For information, contact the center in Mayerson Hall, 3101 Clifton Ave., 221-1874, or e-mail chhe@huc.edu.

The book tells the story of Hana, 13, who was gassed at Auschwitz on Oct. 23, 1944, the day she arrived at the concentration camp.

The story ends on a positive note by ultimately uniting Japanese schoolchildren fascinated by Hana's story with her brother, George Brady, the only member of her immediate family to survive the war.

"I still remember the day when I received the suitcase," Ishioka said from the Los Angeles site of Wednesday's videoconference.

"I was excited, but I didn't know how I could use this one object to tell the story of the Holocaust."

The videoconference was held locally at the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education of Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion. HUC's L.A. partner in the middle-school event was the Museum of Tolerance at the Wiesenthal Center.

The book's author, Karen Levine of Toronto, Canada, and students from Cincinnati and Los Angeles also spoke during the videoconference.

Levine, a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., said there was little to read about the Holocaust when she was growing up.

Students prepared for Wednesday's videoconference by reading Hana's Suitcase.

Andrew Hollon, 14, an eighth-grader at John XXIII Catholic School in Middletown, said he and his classmates complained to their literature teacher "about having to read even more about the Holocaust."

"We felt that one more story wasn't going to change our views or add any more knowledge about the subject," said Andrew, of Lebanon. "We were very ambivalent, thinking that the Holocaust was an atrocity, for sure, but it happened in the past and was not relevant to our lives today."

Andrew said the book was inspiring, adding that he and his classmates judged it prematurely. Upon finishing it, he said, "we realized that something like the Holocaust could happen at any time, in any country in the world."

Other Cincinnati schools participating in the videoconference were Phoenix Community Learning Center in Bond Hill, Quebec Heights School in Price Hill and Yavneh Day School in Sycamore Township.

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