At St. Joseph School, Holocaust survivor recounts
its horrors
By Lou Baldwin
Special to The CS&T
DOWNINGTOWN — Marion Blumenthal Lazan won’t forget the winter
day when, as a child, she watched from her freezing barracks at the infamous
Bergen-Belsen death camp while a cart rumbled by loaded with what looked
to her like firewood. Then she realized the sticks were human corpses.
In those days, she had a desperate game: Each day she sought out four
perfectly matched pebbles. If she found them, she took it as a sign that
she and her parents, Walter and Ruth Blumenthal, and her older brother,
Albert, would survive the horror surrounding them.
The Blumenthals, Jews, “saw things no one … should see”
at the Nazi concentration camp in Lower Saxony, Germany — a camp
where 50,000 Jews and people of other ethnic backgrounds were worked and
starved to death, or murdered outright. Most famous among them was Anne
Frank.
Lazan, now 73, has co-authored with the writer Lila Perl a book about
that harrowing life: “Four Little Pebbles.”
She also lectures around the world, as her way to help make sure no Holocaust
ever transpires again. On Feb. 4, she addressed the upper grades at St.
Joseph School.
“We, as children, saw things that no one at any age should see,”
she told the students. “The filth, the continued horror and fear
that surrounded us — there is no way it can be put into words or
writing.”
Lazan was born in North Germany in 1934, just before Hitler’s systematic
persecution of Jews began.
Many fled before the wave. In January 1939, her own family left for Holland
to await a promised American visa. It came the following January, but
too late to save them. Before they could depart, Germany invaded Holland
and took over the refugee camp where they were living.
In early 1944, even as the war was winding down, the family was sent to
Bergen-Belsen, a camp so filthy and unsanitary that death from dysentery
or typhus always threatened. So did starvation. Lazan was once badly scalded
by soup she and her mother were hiding from Nazi guards.
Finally, as the family and other prisoners were in freight cars on their
way to an extermination camp, they were liberated by the Russian Army.
But the rescue came too late for Lazan’s father, who died soon afterward
from typhus he contracted on the train.
Lazan’s remaining family eventually made it to America. She attributes
her own survival to the strength of her mother, who is still living.
For her own part, she honors with her speeches and writings about the
deaths of millions of Jews and others at the hands of Nazi hate and bigotry.
Teacher Matt Kirsch, who arranged for Lazan’s talk at St. Joseph,
knows genocide still happens in many places around the world.
It is important that children be taught about the Holocaust — especially
from a child-survivor’s perspective, he said: “This is the
last generation that will hear the story of the Holocaust from a survivor
firsthand.”
Matthew Williamson, an eighth-grader who was moved by Lazan’s talk,
noted that his school teaches about the Holocaust. He said he does not
believe something on the scale of the Holocaust could ever happen again.
“But we still have to work on world peace,” he said.
Lou Baldwin is a member of St. Leo Parish and a freelance writer.
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