Local teachers participate in Holocaust remembrance walk

Every year, individuals from all over the globe gather in Poland for an annual program centered on Holocaust remembrance and education. Attendants at the 2026 edition of that program — the International March of the Living — included six teachers from in and around Trempealeau County.

Ryan Mendez from Gale-Ettrick-Trempealeau, Isaac Boukamp from Arcadia, Scott Dyar from Eleva-Strum, Brian Janovich from Cochrane-Fountain City and Shaina Lane-Neddermeyer and Ben Mueller from Osseo-Fairchild given the opportunity to travel to Europe for the trip earlier this spring.

The March of the Living was founded in 1988 and is held each March or April after Passover. Since its inception, several hundred thousand people have participated in the two-week event. The local teacher group attended for a week in April in Poland. Their trip included visits to the Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps and the Kraków Ghetto.

Among the things that resonated deepest with Mendez during the trip was all the individual stories they heard about Holocaust survivors, which helped drive home the impact of Nazi atrocities on a more personal level beyond just the horrifying statistics of the Holocaust’s death toll.

“We had a guide who had been doing it for 20-plus years, these trips, through a variety of organizations. And the thing that he really talked about the whole time was that it wasn’t just six million Jewish people, that it wasn’t just 11 million victims in total in the Holocaust, but that it was one plus one plus one. It was individual stories and individual people,” Mendez said. “I think that was probably the biggest thing that I took away from it. It’s the sheer numbers of the Holocaust, but it’s those individual lives that were so deeply impacted and the people that were victims that were given such choiceless choices to try to survive.”

The group Mendez was a part of was able to attend thanks to local sponsors — an effort led in part by Arcadia native Leah Kubis and her husband, Kevin Kubis, a member of the Cochrane-Fountain City school board. Leah and Kevin took part in the March of the Living along with their son Braden.

The inspiration for helping spearhead an effort to get teachers on the trip came from a chance meeting while in Florida, where much of Leah’s family lives. One of Leah’s mom’s good friends is Scott Saunders, founder and chairman of the March of the Living UK. Upon meeting with Saunders, Leah and Kevin floated their idea of having educators take part in the March of the Living, which got the ball rolling toward this first group of six making the trip.

“If you bring educators in and teach them and make them passionate about this subject, that passion is going to rub off on thousands,” Leah said. “By teaching one, you’re teaching thousands. And that was when the pilot group was born, where Kevin and I and my parents — so we hosted one and my parents hosted five instructors from Trempealeau County to bring them to this event.

That pilot group was a success, and now Saunders and his board of directors want to fill a bus with educators for next year’s March of the Living in the hopes that it can help spread further awareness about the Holocaust and antisemitism.

Leah noted that Lane-Neddermeyer texted her when she shared just some of the details and pictures of her trip with her freshman students when she was starting her unit on the Holocaust, saying that her students were “utterly enraptured” by what she shared and that several stayed after class wanting to know more. 

Mendez still teaches history but mostly in psychology and sociology. He intends to use his experiences from his trip to Poland to help inform how he teaches students starting next year.

“What I have planned, and I didn’t get to implement it because I was kind of past those lessons, is to talk about the way that conformity and obedience work,” Mendez said. “And then the way that things like group think works and group polarization works. Those are the ways I’m going to be kind of adding those things in, but also like for psychology, the basic motivation of people to survive and to exist and to love and to do all the things that these victims were trying to do to hang on.”