It is estimated that more than 1.5 million children – nearly all of them Jewish – were murdered in the Holocaust, and to honor their memories, the Daffodil Project seeks to plant 1.5 million bulbs in gardens worldwide.
Union and Towns counties have their own patches of sunshine set aside for just such a purpose, and on Tuesday, March 10, people gathered both at Meeks Park in Blairsville and Lloyd’s Landing in Hiawassee to remember the high cost of prejudice.
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The goal of the Daffodil Project is twofold. It serves as a living memorial for the young lives lost over the course of one of history’s greatest tragedies, but it also serves to remind the world of children still facing humanitarian crises today.
“These daffodils are our way of honoring the lives cut short by hatred. They lived, they mattered, and we will never forget what happened,” said Steve Ruppe of the Towns-Union Master Gardener Association in opening the Blairsville ceremony, as Robin Volker shared in the opening prayer that “each child was a universe of possibility, each life a light that should have shone brightly in the world.”
City and county officials took part in both ceremonies, with Hiawassee Mayor Junior Chastain attending the Lloyd’s Landing event and Union County Commissioner Harold Collins speaking at Meeks Park.
The Towns-Union Master Gardener Association was first invited to join the Daffodil Project in May 2014. Now, with two gardens in Blairsville, one in Young Harris and another in Hiawassee, all four sites serve as part of the Northeast Georgia Mountains Foothills of Remembrance Trail, which also includes Daffodil Project gardens in Jasper, Ellijay and Blue Ridge.
To date, over 1.2 million daffodils have been planted in 776 locations around the world. Chosen for its resemblance to the yellow star that Jewish people were forced to wear during the Holocaust, the daffodil is also a resilient flower that returns each spring with the reminder that life is eternal.
As part of the remembrance ceremony, the biographies of a few of the children were read aloud and posted in the garden, where they will remain for 30 days. Community children gave voice to those who could no longer speak, with credits to Jaedyn, Emberlyn and Matthew Williams in Towns County, and Justice Dyer, Lydia Stafford and Juliana Kay in Union County.
One of those biographies detailed the life of Joseph Gani, who grew up on the shores of the Ionian Sea. His father ran a textile shop as Joseph focused his energy on sports and studying. Joseph was a teenager when he and the rest of his community were forcibly moved from Greece to Poland in March of 1944.
In Auschwitz-Birkenau, Joseph was assigned to the Sonderkommando, where he carried bodies out of the gas chambers to mass graves. By October of 1944, some of the Sonderkommando revolted – including Joseph. They managed to disarm the guards and blow up one of the crematoriums. Although he lost his life at only 18 years old, Joseph found the bravery to stand up against his oppressors.
Another biography described how Lidia Lebowitz, the younger of two sisters, lived with her family in Sárospatak, Hungary. There, her parents ran a dry goods store that became popular among townspeople and farmers for its fabric. When Lidia was 2, her aunt, visiting from America, noticed increased Nazi activity.
German forces occupying Hungary expelled the Lebowitz family from their home and rounded them up with other Jewish people into a synagogue, where they were forced to stay for three days.
From there, Lidia and her family were among 15,000 transferred to a ghetto, which was destroyed over the course of May and June 1944. The entire Jewish community, including the Lebowitzes, were loaded into freight cars bound for Auschwitz, and 10-year-old Lidia and her parents “were never heard from again.”
Commissioner Harold Collins thanked the Towns-Union Master Gardeners for ensuring that the memories of children like Joseph and Lidia are kept alive.
“It’s truly sad for not only the children, but all those who went through this … I couldn’t imagine walking up on one of those camps where they had been doing that. I just pray it never happens again,” Collins said.
As Towns County School Board Member Roy Perrin offered a poignant, heartfelt prayer at the Hiawassee site, so too did Alan Schulman, President of the Jewish Congregation of Blue Ridge, recite the Kaddish in Union County.
“This is not the end of it,” warned Schulman, advising the audience to take a stand against antisemitism. “This is great that we remember, but you need to remember today, right? And do whatever you can so that this doesn’t happen again. You know, we say ‘never again,’ but it’s only up to us to make sure ‘never again’ never happens.”
