Vladka Meed sat barricaded in the Warsaw ghetto, anxiously awaiting the eruption of violence that would soon break out. Meed and several of her neighbors had collected rocks, bottles and knives to defend themselves against the German soldiers, who stood poised to crush the resistance.

“We had no expectation that we would live beyond the next few weeks. Why not resist when the alternative was death at a time and place chosen by the Nazis,” Meed wrote years later in her memoir, “On Both Sides of the Wall”.

This scene, based on Meed’s firsthand accounts of the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943, is what freshman Lexie Braverman will help portray today as part of a walk-through interactive museum sponsored by Hillel for Holocaust Memorial Day.

Participants will meet at 7 p.m. on the first floor of the Center for Natural Sciences and will be led through four scenes performed by Braverman, sophomores Michelle Bart and Rob Coleman and senior Craig Rosenberg.

Holocaust Memorial Day, typically called Yom HaShoah, will be celebrated tomorrow — eight days before Israeli Independence Day. Yom HaShoah was first proclaimed a Jewish holiday in 1959 by Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. The original plan was to hold Yom HaShoah on the 14th day of the Jewish month of Nisan to commemorate the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, but the date was changed because it fell just before Passover.

Freshman Molly Wernick, vice president for Hillel and organizer of the event, said each monologue was based on firsthand accounts from survivors of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Wernick said she hopes the experience will help people connect to the Holocaust on a personal level.

“After hearing the numbers over and over again, they lose their value,” she said. “We often forget that those numbers represent people.”

Wernick said she learned about the Holocaust in school but was not fully impacted until she traveled to Israel and Poland last year as part of a trip sponsored by Habonim Dror, a zionist youth movement.

“You see it in a photograph in a book and think, ‘Oh, that’s terrible,’” Wernick said. “But actually being there, being able to reach out and touch the gates of Auschwitz, it’s … it’s so much more powerful.”

Jewish Chaplain Michael Faber said Hillel has commemorated Holocaust Memorial Day as long as he can remember, but this is the first time the college has done anything like this to educate the campus community about the Holocaust.

“I think it’ll go over really well with students,” he said. “Having someone standing right in front of you, telling a real story — that will really get to you on an emotional level. You can’t beat that.”

Faber said the chapel also screened the Italian movie “Life is Beautiful” on Monday to help commemorate the day.

Wernick said she hopes the event will draw students, faculty, staff and community members of all faiths, since the Holocaust affects everyone regardless of their religious beliefs.

Braverman said Wernick approached her about performing and was immediately excited by the project, particularly because her grandfather helped liberate several of the concentration camps in Germany and Poland in the 1940s.

Braverman said many people have heard the facts about the Holocaust so much they have become desensitized to it — something she hopes her performance will help change.

“Instead of reading about it … actually seeing it performed in front of them, by real people, will really hit people,” she said. “[The performance], hopefully, will make it more real than just looking at numbers in a book.”

Braverman said though genocide still exists today, she hopes people will recall the Holocaust and keep it from happening again.

“People tend to forget genocide is still going on in the world today,” she said. “If we get people to remember this and feel like they are connected to it in some way, then maybe we can live up to the mantra that came out of the Holocaust: ‘Never again.’”