Florida Catholic | Dana Edwards is hooked on history

Dana Edwards is hooked on history

JPII student competes on national level with Holocaust project.

MARCI ELLIOTT | FLORIDA CATHOLIC CORRESPONDENT

Published: 07.04.08

MARCI ELLIOTT | FC
Dana Edwards displays the blue ribbons she won for her history project, Double Crossing: Conflict and Compromise of the SS St. Louis.

TALLAHASSEE | It’s been five years since Dana Edwards became hooked on history.

In that seemingly short period, the 16–year–old student from John Paul II Catholic High School in Tallahassee has parlayed her self–named “addiction” into an award–winning love of bringing history to life.

Dana, who is going into her junior year, won first place in the state in the National Council of Jewish Women’s “Holocaust Essay Contest” in May. She also recently returned from Washington, D.C., where she competed June 18 in the 2008 National History Day competition at the Smithsonian’s Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture. Some 2,800 students from around the country attended the competition and Dana placed 12th out of 92 finalists.

Dana’s project – a five–foot high, five–piece display of photographs, documents and narration she made herself with some behind-the-scenes help from her parents – was titled “Double Crossing: Conflict and Compromise of the SS St. Louis,” in keeping with the event’s theme of conflict and compromise in history.

“I was really excited about winning the essay contest. I didn’t think I was going to win because of all the entries. There were four counties competing in the region,” said Dana, the daughter of Barb and Jerry Edwards of Tallahassee, all members of Good Shepherd Parish.

Dana said she chose the double voyage of the SS St. Louis because of its ties to Florida – and because it was one of the lesser-known incidents of the Holocaust. In 1939, Jewish refugees boarded the German ocean liner believing they were going to escape to Cuba, but were denied entrance to that country and to the U.S. and Canada. The voyage was a propaganda exercise by the Nazi government, meant to prove that no Western country would accept Jewish refugees.

“I wanted to do something that involved Florida,” she said. “Most people don’t know about this, so the topic was just what I was looking for.”

Dana’s mentor, recently retired teacher Pete Cowdrey, helped her pick the subject for her project. He worked with her in the past when she entered projects on the Holocaust and other topics in the Leon County history fair at Trinity Catholic School.

Her parents agreed that history projects were a natural for their daughter.

“By participating in the history fair, Dana has met and interviewed some amazing people over the years who have helped bring history to life,” Barb Edwards said. “She works very hard on her projects and appreciates the value of quality research through primary and secondary resources, writing an annotated bibliography, presentation skills, developing thesis statements and analyzing information while having fun at the same time.”

Jerry Edwards said his daughter possessed an understanding of the importance of such projects that not all students had.

“We try to encourage her and help her in her projects,” he said. “Students can learn a lot through project work. There’s not a quick return in gratification in this – it doesn’t happen overnight. Dana has an attitude now in that she knows what it takes. She really likes working on her own.”

Dana’s first history fair project, she said, started out as an extra-credit assignment five years ago at Trinity, when she entered an exhibit on surrealist artist Salvador Dali.

“I participated in National History Day and became hooked on history,” she said.

Dana wrote five drafts for her SS St. Louis project.

“At the time, Hitler wanted the world to know that nobody wanted Jews,” she said. “There were 937 of them altogether on the SS St. Louis, but only 29 had valid visas and got into Cuba. Because of immigration laws, the others couldn’t get in. And Americans were afraid the Jews would get all their jobs. President (Franklin Delano) Roosevelt just got out of the Great Depression and there were a lot of things going on during that time in history.”

After circling around Cuba and trying to dock in Miami without success, the SS St. Louis had to go back to Europe, Dana explains in her project. There, four countries accepted the Jews on board and took them in: Great Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and France.

But there were disastrous consequences, she said. “Of the Jews accepted into those countries, 254 eventually were killed by Hitler.”

Through her research, Dana learned that one of the survivors of that fateful double voyage was still alive and living in Miami. He was Herbert Karliner, who co-authored a book, “Refuge Denied,” with Judith Steel, who now lives in New York. Dana went to Miami and interviewed Karliner in person and she interviewed Steel by phone.

“Mr. Karliner was so nice. It was really, really cool to get to talk to him,” Dana said. “He consults with people on the Holocaust and is happy to talk to them because he wants more people to know about (the SS St. Louis incident).”

Dana said she watched an A&E cable channel film on the topic, “Voyage of the Damned,” starring actress Faye Dunaway, but didn’t like it because it wasn’t true to the historic facts.

“It was too ‘Hollywood-ized,’” she said.

Included in the SS St. Louis project are several photos Dana copied off the National Holocaust Museum’s Web site, including one of Karliner when he was 12 years old. The project also includes copies of newspaper stories of the voyage from microfilm and postcards, telegrams and other documents.

“My parents helped me buy everything and they really supported me by staying up with me to find things on the Internet,” she said.

Barbara Goldstein, Holocaust education program co-chairwoman for the Tallahassee area chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women, was impressed with Dana’s work. And, she said, teaching children about the Holocaust is vitally important.

“We are rapidly entering the period of our history where no direct survivors of the Holocaust will be around and we will only hear from children of survivors rather than the firsthand accounts we get today,” Goldstein said. “We have to ensure that the program carries on and that the voices of those who perished in the Holocaust will never be silenced. Students need to learn the lessons of the Holocaust to prevent this from happening again.”

In addition to working on Holocaust and history projects, Dana is involved in several other activities that keep her busy. She has been taking ballet lessons since she was 3 years old at the Sharon Davis School of Dance. She plays the piano, writes for the Tallahassee Democrat’s online Teen Democrat, takes a journalism class, and is a member of her high school dance team, tennis team, student council, National Honor Society and Squirettes, and works on the yearbook.

She likes art history and is seriously considering making that her career, perhaps as a curator.

And to think all this started with an extra-credit project on Salvador Dali, she said.

“I didn’t realize what I got myself into,” Dana said, laughing. “I kept going on to the next level, and it led to this.”

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Dana Edwards is hooked on history

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