“The last time me and my sisters saw our father in the concentration camp, he said to us, ‘You have to stay alive so that you can tell the rest of the world, what are they doing to us,'” said Rosa Schindler, 86, Holocaust survivor. More than 300 hundred students at Pacific Beach Middle School went to see Schindler tell her survivor story. Eighth graders Carson Wells and Sebastian Poli invited Schindler to their school as their community project. Wells and Poli were happy about how well the event went. “I thought kids are just going to play around and not listen, but to hear that silence with middle schoolers during the presentation was weird and amazing. They clearly got something out of it because normally they are just whispering and moving around,” Wells notes. The students’ said they wanted to raise awareness about the Holocaust and they don’t want the past to be the future. They hope that when the younger generation knows about the past, it could make a big difference. “I guess all the teachers wanted to let their kids find out the truth about what happened and learn more about it. I’m really glad that lot of people showed up so that we can get our message across,” Poli said. Schindler told the students about how her mother and some of her siblings were killed in gas chambers in Auschwitz and how her brother and father were killed in a labor camp. Schindler and two of her sisters managed to get to a labor camp and stayed there until the end of World War II when they were freed from the camps.
Before going to concentration camps, Jewish children were bullied harshly in German schools. “Don’t let anyone bully you. If you are being bullied, tell your teacher or principal. Kids can be really cruel to each other,” she said. “Not as many Americans know about the Holocaust as they should. It’s nothing to advertise. It was already 75 years ago and we are losing Holocaust survivors every day, most of them are over 90 now,” she notes.
Schindler has been talking for 50 years about surviving the Holocaust. Poli says her story was really touching and he’s happy that he now knows a lot more about it. “I learned so much more through having a first person tell about it. She was there, she witnessed all this,” Wells said.