Dr. James Bertsch has penned a truly exquisite article honoring the memory of the esteemed foreign language teacher Madam Camilla (Belzak) Guendel. We express our gratitude for his heartfelt tribute.

Additional comments by Dr. Bertsch;
“Sayville lost a legend with the passing of French and Russian teacher Madam Camila Guendel. The child of Polish immigrants, she started a Russian language program and brought Sayville students to Moscow in the middle of the Cold War. And today, twenty years after her retirement, just about every academically oriented Sayville student is either a fluent or competent student of another language. Mrs. Guendel has everything to do with that.

I hope you enjoy my article about Mrs. Guendel in today’s Suffolk County News. I enjoyed writing it. I feel such a debt to my daughters’ teachers especially in the area of Foreign Language. I trace that back directly to Mrs. Guendel. She was a once in a lifetime teacher.”

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