When we started this school year, we began with the essential question: At what point would you grant forgiveness? Then we read a true story about Holocaust survivor, Eva Kor.

 

Eva, as well as many other Holocaust survivors, lost their family members and much more while enduring the worst possible living conditions at the hand of the Nazis.

 

Even though this happened to her, she taught us how to stay determined during life’s worst possible storms and to never give up. At the end of Eva’s book, she teaches 3 life lessons, and the 3rd one stood out to us: “Forgive your worst enemy. It will heal your soul and set you free.”

 

Eva did this herself many years after the Holocaust when she met with a former Nazi doctor. After he admitted to living with nightmares his entire life for committing the crimes that he had done, Eva decided that there was only one thing she could do to free herself and no longer remain a victim: FORGIVE...and so she did. She wrote a formal letter of forgiveness and shared it at the 40th Anniversary of the Liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

 

This was so inspiring to us that we wanted to carry on Eva’s message while also educating others about the Holocaust. Now that Eva had changed our hearts about granting forgiveness, our essential question transformed into: How can we spread the idea of forgiveness in our own lives while also acknowledging that conflict will always be present?

 

We thought…if Eva can forgive after this extreme level of conflict, then can’t we be inspired to handle our own life conflicts in a better way?…no matter how big or small?

 

Ironically, our school is designated as a Restorative Practices school, which means we follow a positive systematic approach for handling conflict. When we have conflicts…big or small…we have what is called a Restorative Circle.

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Therefore, we created Eva' Kortyard.