Until this month, 21-year-old Agustina Cruz had never left Argentina. Before this year, she had never even been to Buenos Aires, which is more than 900 miles southeast of her hometown of Palpalá, a small city of 60,000 people located in Jujuy, a region known for soaring rock formations. 

That all changed earlier this year when she became the inaugural recipient of the White Rose Award, a prize administered by the U.S. Embassy in Argentina and the Buenos Aires Holocaust Museum. The award was named for a group of Germans who openly protested Adolf Hitler and the Nazis’ extermination of Jews.

Cruz won the award for advocating for the Romani, a community so marginalized in Argentina that people accused her of “getting into the mouth of the devil” — a Spanish expression — simply for publicly supporting a Roma family in the face of taunting from her classmates. 

But her planned trip this month to Washington, where she was slated to visit the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and tour the city, almost fell apart due to ignorance and hate. 

One of Cruz’s university professors had initially told her that she would get an excused absence for missing class. But once that professor found out that Cruz would be on a trip to learn about the Holocaust, the professor said Cruz could not miss class, because the trip was sponsored by a Jewish organization. 

“She shouldn’t be discriminated against for doing the right thing herself,” said Marc Stanley, who served as U.S. ambassador to Argentina from 2022 until January of this year. He worked with the Holocaust Museum of Buenos Aires on the award, and accompanied Cruz to Washington earlier this month after she decided to make the trip and risk a failing grade in her course.

“In my community, there’s lots of ignorance. They do not respect the Roma community,” Cruz told Jewish Insider via a translator at the end of an eventful day at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, which included a two-hour private tour and a meeting with a Holocaust survivor. As she described the bullying she faced for standing up for embattled members of the Roma community, Cruz began to cry. 

She had learned about the White Rose Award from her teacher, Lorena Rosa Blanca, who accompanied her on the trip to Washington. Cruz was selected as the winner by a panel in Buenos Aires that included Stanley and Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders.

“She’s a very strong girl who suffered discrimination at school,” Rosa Blanca told JI. 

As Cruz walked through the museum, she recorded video of nearly everything her Spanish-speaking tour guide said, including when he told her that her work is important “for humankind.” She paused at a panel about the Roma, which explained that “long-held prejudices were fueled by Nazi racism.” Between 250,000 and 500,000 members of the Roma community were killed by the Nazis. Cruz took in the exhibits with awe and horror, including a section about the Nazis who hid out in Argentina after the end of the war. 

“I feel so enriched by all of this information,” Cruz said afterward. “I’m thinking of using social media, perhaps TikTok or some other social media [platform], to reach out to teenagers and open their eyes to the history, to all the suffering, and to the fact that we are all human beings, and we all deserve to enjoy human rights.”

The project had a diplomatic goal, in addition to the educational goal for the recipient. Educating about the Holocaust — and about tolerance — is an American value that U.S. emissaries abroad have a duty to promote, Stanley explained. 

“I think human rights is certainly a U.S. value,” Stanley said. “Making known that we both [the U.S. and Argentina] have museums like this, that we both constantly battle against discrimination against marginalized communities, is something that I worked on as U.S. ambassador. Showing that we’re in the same fights with Argentina, that we’re all in the same boat, I think is important.”

Cruz, now studying social work as a university student, said she plans to let her peers know “that they should not be afraid to speak up to defend other people, other people who may be different.”

Suzanna Tarica, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor who was born in France in 1940, listened intently as Cruz shared her story. 

“What you’re doing is what I want to do also,” Tarica told Cruz. “We are looking at accomplishing the same goal, which is tolerance, understanding and peace — and to get rid of ignorance.”