2025 Press Release

Students recognized in Holocaust-themed art, writing contest

Exhibition honors the experiences of local survivors

South Bend, Ind. – Beginning Wednesday, the creative works of nearly six dozen Michiana youth will be on display to the community. “The People Next Door,” an art and creative writing contest for local high school students, will launch a public exhibition at the downtown Mishawaka–Penn–Harris Public Library on Wednesday, April 23. 

The exhibition kicks off at 5:00 p.m. with an awards reception and gallery opening. Of the seventy-one entries received this year, twenty-two will be recognized at the awards reception. The honorees will receive cash prizes ranging from $50 to $300. Following the awards reception, all are invited to preview the exhibition which will be available to the public April 24-30 during normal library hours.  

The contest, last held in 2023 and organized biennially since 2001 by the Kurt and Tessye Simon Fund for Holocaust Remembrance, shares its name with a locally-produced video documentary. “The People Next Door” documentary recounts the personal experiences of Jews who survived Nazi aggressions and eventually relocated to Michiana. 

Students from local high schools were invited to view the documentary and create a work of visual art or creative writing in response. Their work reflects a variety of themes shared by the survivors – everything from horror to hope – and makes poignant connections between the present and not-so-distant past.

Images of 2023's Awards Ceremony and Gallery Opening courtesy of the Mishawaka-Pann-Harris Public Library

“It really was not very long ago,” John Adams High School teacher Elizabeth Drake said about the survivors’ experiences. Drake has included the topic in her English class for several years. “Any time you can give a local face to history and help students see that there are still people in our community who experienced these things, that’s really powerful,” Drake says.

One of Drake’s former students, Lily Francis Lemrow-Collazo-Rosario, now a senior, has participated in the contest regularly since she was a freshman. She was honored in 2023 with the $300 first place prize in poetry for her poem, “Shoes.”  

“I was shaking while watching the documentary,” says Lemrow-Collazo-Rosario, whose mother first encouraged her in 2022 to pursue her interest in the contest outside of class. Her poem entitled “Why Was I Chosen to Survive?” was an emotional first-person account of one survivor’s guilt. The poem concluded with a sense of purpose: to keep telling the survivors’ stories. 

“We talk about the Holocaust a little bit in school,” said Lemrow-Collazo-Rosario following her recognition in 2023.  “We know it was a negative thing that should never happen again. But I wanted to dig deeper. We need to talk about these things outside of school and outside of essays or homework. I think that is why they survived, to share their stories,” she said. 

In the 2023 contest, Saint Joseph High School senior Even Eggleston’s digital composition entitled “Then and Now,” received an honorable mention award of $50 in the art category. The piece, which juxtaposed familiar photos of Nazi concentration camps with modern images, made a clear visual connection between the Holocaust and current events. 

“They see the connection in today’s headlines,” says contest co-organizer Michelle Freel. “They see what has been going on, and how it’s so similar to what happened prior to World War Two,” she says. A school counselor herself, Freel hopes students who participate in the contest “will think of themselves as upstanders – when they see people being bullied or taken advantage of, they will speak up about it and get involved,” she says.  

A complete list of contest winners will be available after April 23 at www.peoplenextdoor.org. 

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Images of 2023 submissions are available at peoplenextdoor.org/virtual-exhibition. 

About The People Next Door Student Art and Creative Writing Contest

When we fail to learn from history, we risk repeating it. This contest, sponsored biennially by the Kurt & Tessye Simon Fund for Holocaust Remembrance, is an opportunity for students in grades 9-12 to hear the stories of South Bend’s own Holocaust survivors. Students are invited to view The People Next Door, a documentary sharing the personal experiences of Jews who survived the Nazi anti-Semitism of the 1930’s and 1940’s and relocated to the South Bend area. Student participants then reflect on those stories, and create an original work of art or creative writing in response. 

About the Kurt & Tessye Simon Fund for Holocaust Remembrance

The Kurt and Tessye Simon Fund for Holocaust Remembrance at Temple Beth-El in South Bend, Indiana is dedicated to developing educational resources for raising awareness of the Holocaust among both the Jewish and non-Jewish communities. 

Kurt Simon, born in Germany in 1913, came to South Bend in 1930 at age 16 to work at Simon Brothers Incorporated, his cousins’ wholesale grocery business. He graduated from South Bend Central High School and completed his University of Notre Dame degree in four years while also working part time, eventually becoming President and CEO of Simon Brothers.  In 1937, Kurt was able to bring his parents, a sister and an uncle from Nazi Germany to join him in South Bend. Kurt always said that rescue was one of his “greatest achievements.”  Without his intervention, they would have likely been killed in the Holocaust -- as many others in his family were. Kurt married Tessye Dounn on March 12, 1942.