On November 27, at an event in New York City, Nick Coddington, a history teacher at Charles Wright Academy, will be honored as the nation’s top holocaust educator. The Jewish Foundation for the Righteous will present Coddington with the Robert I. Goldman Award, an award given annually to a teacher who demonstrates excellence and creativity in the field of Holocaust education.

As a senior NATO intelligence officer, Coddington watched the world stand by during the Rwandan genocide. He witnessed in the Balkans the type of atrocities most people read about in history books. After 21 years in the US Army, the West Point graduate with three masters degrees retired from the military and became a high school history teacher, intent on teaching the next generation of citizens and leaders to stand up for what’s right.

In just his third year of teaching, that commitment has already taken Coddington and his students half way around the world and led Charles Wright, an independent school in University Place, to create one of the nation’s most unique Holocaust education programs.

At Charles Wright, Coddington starts teaching his high school freshmen about the Holocaust by matching photos of his students’ families with photos of victims of the Holocaust – two families at the beach, riding horses or having dinner. He asks the students to write an essay about the similarities they see between their own family and the one in the old picture. Then, together, they begin researching what happened to that family and their community.

“Genocides separate people by convincing people that they aren’t like each other,” Coddington explains. “So I start by getting students to identify with the victims of the Holocaust. I want them to understand that this can happen to anyone and that intolerance in any society can lead to genocide if people don’t stand up for what’s right.”

The Washington State Holocaust Research Center in Seattle helped Coddington create this unique curriculum which covers genocides in Armenia, Russia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rawanda and Darfur, as well as the Holocaust. The Center helped him find three Holocaust survivors who came to Charles Wright to meet Coddington’s students: Thomas Blot, one of four living survivors of the escape from Sovebor; Klaus Stern, a survivor of Auschwitz; and Steve Audler, a member of the 1938 Kindertransport.

“At the end of the year, I show my students a clip of President Clinton’s 1994 speech to where he talks about Rawanda,” says Coddington. “By this point in the course, they understand that throughout the 20th century nations have only acted to stop genocides only when it was in their own national interest. I stop the tape after Clinton describes the genocide in Rawanda and I ask them what they think he’s going to say. Of course, they are all hoping that he will say this time will be different and this time the United States will step in. I re-start the tape and the President says the United States will only do what is in its own national interest. The students are really disheartened that as a nation, we haven’t changed.”

“What I try to teach them is that there is hope, because we can look at how brave people have done heroic things in these situations and made a difference. You have to give them heroes to look up to because governments don’t help people, people do. I want them to identify with the Holocaust rescuers, as well as the victims, and be ready to step up and take a stand against intolerance in their own lives, whether it’s bullying in the hallway or an atrocity like genocide.”

Last fall, the Center in Seattle offered Coddington a unique opportunity to spend a week at Columbia University with educators from across the United States and Europe who teach about the Holocaust. Coddington and his roommate, Marcin Pasnikowski from Swidnik, Poland, stayed up late at night asking each other: ‘How do we do our jobs? How do we teach justice and tolerance using the Holocaust as a framework?’

They came up with an audacious idea, to take 12 students from Charles Wright to Swidnik, Poland, as the first Americans to participate in the annual Holocaust Remembrance Week. Thanks to the enthusiasm of his students and the support of school administrators and parents, Coddington and Pasnikowski brought their students together in Poland just seven months later with teens from Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Italy.

“You can study the Holocaust every day of your life, but when you stand at the gates of Auschwitz it’s an overwhelming experience,” says Coddington. As the group prepared for the trip, he worked hard to prepare students for what they would see and challenged them to try to understand how the culture that gave the world Goethe and Beethoven, a culture so many Americans came from, could have let this happen. He showed them pictures of Nazi’s rounding up Jews and showed them pictures of Japanese families being rounded up on Bainbridge Island. He showed them signs in Germany that read “No Jews Allowed,” then showed them the same signs in New York. More than anything, he wanted to be sure they understood the Holocaust can not be written off as something that happened long ago that can not possibly happen again.

In Poland, the students visited the death camps at Majdanek and Birkenau, and the prison at Auschwitz. “There’s something about going to a place where something happened, breathing the same air, walking in the same dust, asking ‘What would I have done if I had been here?’” says Coddington. “It’s a place where profound evil happened and you have to ask: ‘How can we go and live the rest of our lives? How do we make something good come out of what happened?’”

For Megan Johnson, a Charles Wright senior from University Place, the trip was a life-changing experience. “I am simply astonished at the fact that I even had the opportunity to visit such monumental places,” she says. “To think that I am part of the last generation that will get the chance to meet living holocaust survivors and in the same month, visit two of the most impactful death camps is absolutely unbelievable. Holding hands around the memorial at Majdanek gave off such an energy, something that cannot be explained. All of us were, for one moment, a part of a whole, coming together in peace and serenity, with a silent understanding and appreciation that cannot be described in words. It was simply amazing.”

Over dinner with Pasnikowski’s family one night, Coddington discovered an eerie coincidence: seventeen years ago, he was a tank commander with the U.S. Army, stationed at a crossing point along the Polish border. Pasnikowski’s father was a tank commander with the Polish Army, working for the Soviet Union at the very same time and place. Most likely, they were watching each other nervously through binoculars.

“Seventeen years ago we were enemies, just because our governments said so,” says Coddington, shaking his head. “We all try to teach our children that there are people in every country who are just like them, but a warm man can’t know what a cold man feels. You can’t really understand a place until you go and stay with a family in their own home. These kids are so fortunate to have figured that out at the age of 15 or 16.”

Coddington’s students had similar experiences staying with Polish families. They discovered that six people could live quite happily in 600 square feet and that teenagers everywhere love music, clothes and dancing. As they boarded the bus headed to the airport, they were less concerned about international politics, and more concerned when they could see their new friends again. The feelings were mutual; the Polish students stood across the road, effectively blocking the bus from carrying their friends away.

Kimberly Ellwanger of Olympia went on the trip with her daughter Kate, a Charles Wright junior. “We and our kids will never forget this trip,” she says. “Our kids formed very strong bonds with their Polish hosts. While our hosts, for the most part, didn’t have nearly the “stuff” we all take for granted, our kids did not want to leave.”

“Never tell a Charles Wright mother what she can not do,” laughs Coddington. It was students and a handful of mothers who came up with idea of bringing the Polish students to Tacoma for a visit this fall. Together, they raised $11,000 to fund the trip and opened their homes to the sons and daughters of those who welcomed their children in Europe.

The students from Poland came with all sorts of ideas about America, mainly based on what they’ve seen on TV. All Americans are rich. They think they’re the best. They do what they want and push people around. They want to control the world. They’re greedy. Instead, they discovered what the Charles Wright students had found in Europe: that we’re all pretty much the same.

The Charles Wright host families took their visitors to Costco and the Pike Place Market. They toured the state capital and the Space Needle, and carved pumpkins for Halloween. They went to football games and the homecoming dance. At the end of the trip, there were a lot of tearful goodbyes and everyone was exhausted from staying up late at night talking about everything and nothing. Just as the Polish students did in Warsaw, the Charles Wright students linked arms and blocked the road to keep the bus from leaving for the airport.

Charles Wright will send another 12 students to Poland this spring to participate in the Holocaust Remembrance Week. If all goes according to plan, the families that host those students will send their own children to Washington state in the fall. It’s a relationship the school hopes to develop further as it builds it’s Holocaust curriculum.

JT News, the voice of Jewish Washington, shared with readers the thoughts of Charles Wright students and parents who participated in the exchange. Click here to read the story.

UPDATE, 11/28: Click here to read what The Olympian had to say about Coddington.