Book by AH student at Holocaust Museum

Though her current career aspiration is to become a teacher, an Abington Heights High School junior is about to become an author more than a year before she graduates.

“The Quiet Game,” a children’s book, was authored and illustrated as a class assignment by Alexis “Allie” Gee, Clarks Summit, in her sophomore year. It will be published and made available for sale this month at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shop in Washington D.C. The book, which features a fictional young female protagonist who must stay silent to avoid capture during the Holocaust, will also be available for purchase at the museum’s Web site, www.ushmm.org.

The publication of the book, with an initial order for the museum of 200 copies, will also serve as Gee’s mandatory senior community service project. All proceeds will be donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“The book tells the story of the Holocaust from a child’s perspective, but I worked hard to make the subject matter relatable to children, so that they could understand what was happening,” Gee, 16, said of the book. She completed it as a creative assignment for social science teacher Jason Burke’s Comparative World Studies Class last year.

“I almost cried reading it,” Burke said. “Students turn in outstanding projects every year, but Allie’s book captured the essence of what I hope the kids do with the assignment: artistically express the emotional repercussions of the Holocaust. ”

“The Holocaust invokes something in me—when that happens, I usually write things down. Poems, drawings, things like that evolved into the book,” Gee said, while referencing modern day genocide in Darfur as contemporary source material. “Telling the story in this way hopefully makes it easier to introduce the concept of genocide to children, and to educate them about it so that it won’t happen again, anywhere.”

Burke brought the book and other artistic projects to Tova Weiss, director of the Holocaust Education Resource Center in Scranton, who displayed the work in 2009. “It was well received,” Gee said. “Tova Weiss was very willing to help publicize the book and try to help me get it published.”

Burke also assisted Gee in attempting to get her work published, but it wasn’t until Gee reached out to the Holocaust Memorial Museum that she was able to realize that goal. She was notified of the museum shop’s acceptance of her work via a January e-mail from Paul Messersmith, the shop’s buyer.

“We get a few hundred requests a year, but we don’t accept them all,” Messersmith said. “Usually we get memoirs of survivors or the children of survivors. Most are already published. This was pretty unique—someone wanting to self-publish and donate the proceeds. We’re always looking for things to teach young people about the Holocaust and this is quite good.”

Gee said her parents, John and Rena Gee, Clarks Summit, helped her navigate the copyright and legal issues involved.

“I already have a copy of the original book laid out on cardboard in my classroom. It will remain there until the day I retire,” Burke said.

Gee also plans to be in classrooms for a long time—she intends to attend college after she graduates in 2011 and pursue a career in children’s education. She may continue to write “on the side,” with a possible sequel to “The Quiet Game” already part of her thoughts.

“I hope we can continue to teach the lessons of the Holocaust to children so that we can prevent genocide from happening again.”

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