Coral Gables High School senior Natalie Viglucci is working to make sure that the world remembers the horrors of the Holocaust by doing video interviews with Holocaust survivors. The Holocaust Project interviews will be posted on Vimeo and maybe YouTube as well.
“I’m doing sort of a series. Each survivor is going to have their own video, either 20-25 minutes,” Viglucci said.
The two survivors she has talked to so far were not sent to concentration camps, but they had close encounters with the Nazis and they lost family in the camps.
“It’s fascinating in a horrifying way,” she said. “It makes it more real when they give you anecdotal stories.”
One of the survivors was age 9 and traveled with his baby brother on his back.
“He would change his name wherever he stayed,” Viglucci said.
She is doing the project so the upcoming generation can see for themselves what happened.
“My generation doesn’t like to read. I know my peers don’t want to read them [the stories],” she saID. “I thought I’d make a video series to appeal to people because of the changing time and videos taking precedence over literature.”
Viglucci hopes to post the videos in February.
The Holocaust Project is her submission for her International Baccalaureate community service and action requirement. She has more than 1,000 volunteer hours from being in Twenty Little Working Girls, a community service organization, serving dinner at Camillus House and participating in beach cleanups with the school’s eco club, Gables Earth.
Viglucci is a member of the National Honor Society; Quill and Scroll, the journalism honor society, and she is vice president of Student Council. She is on the staff of the school news magazine and she plays varsity soccer.
It will be spring before she knows which college she will attend. She has applied to some schools as a film production major and other schools as an English major.
— Linda Rodriguez Berfeld
