Holocaust Survivor Shares History, Experience with Goodrell Students
Marion Blumenthal Lazan, a survivor of the Holocaust, shares her history and experience with Goodrell Middle School students.
There are assemblies and then there are assemblies. From a student point of view, many of them, let’s face it, don’t amount to much more than a break in the humdrum of the regular class schedule. But just when you think if you’ve seen one you’ve seen ‘em all, along comes a force of nature named Marion Blumenthal Lazan.
If you were going to profile the sort of person who could come to a middle school, spellbind an auditorium full of adolescents and have them lining up afterwards for autographs, hugs and pictures, what sort of persona would you have in mind? A famous athlete? A pop/hip hop/rock star, perhaps? How about a 77 year-old woman who survived the Holocaust?
Mrs. Lazan’s extraordinary gifts as a speaker coupled with the raw power of her personal story made for a morning the students and staff at Goodrell Middle School aren’t likely to forget. And that was the essence of her message – never forget.
“Yours is the last generation that will ever be able to hear firsthand accounts of what happened,” she emphasized to her listeners, most of whom are about the same age Mrs. Lazan was when she came to America in 1948 at the age of thirteen. “You must never take your lives and your freedoms and your families for granted.”
How could they after hearing her unflinching account of a childhood that began happily above her father’s shoe store in Hoya, Germany with her parents, Walter and Ruth, and older brother, Albert before unraveling, first beneath the boot of laws that banned Jews from theaters, parks and schools and later in the horror chamber that was Bergen-Belsen, the same camp where Anne Frank died?
She saw wagons loaded with what she first assumed was firewood for the stove in the barracks; the barracks built for 100 that were crammed with 600. But the stove was never lit. And the wagons weren’t loaded with firewood. They were full of naked, dead bodies. She stood in formations where the only defense against frostbite was the warmth of one’s own urine. Once a month showers came with uncertainty as to whether water or gas would spray out when the faucets turned on. Her regular pastime was squeezing lice between her fingernails, until she developed the strategy of imaginary games. One of them later became the title of an award-winning memoir. Four Perfect Pebbles refers to Mrs. Lazan’s daily quest to scrounge four same-sized, same-shaped rocks and save them. Each one represented a member of her family. She pretended she was saving her family every day.
Reluctantly at first, Mrs. Lazan began speaking publicly in 1979. Her presentation is practiced and polished. But there is nothing routine about it. She matter-of-factly recited the chronology of suffering and recalled the constant stench of filth and death that was in the air she breathed as a young girl. And then the story brightened and so did she. The phrase “lucky me” repeated over and over as she came to America, met and married her devoted husband, Nathaniel, and they started the family that’s branched into three children, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild, so far. She proudly produces a picture of her unsinkable mother, who recently celebrated her 104th birthday!
This is Mrs. Lazan’s third visit to Goodrell. It comes in the midst of the 8th graders’ unit about the Holocaust. All of them have a signed copy of Four Perfect Pebbles. Incredibly, English teacher Sarah Knobloch and Mrs. Lazan are both graduates of Peoria Central High School in Peoria, Illinois. Mrs. Lazan ranked 8th in a class of 267 when she graduated on-time in 1953 after starting school as a teenage 4th grader when she arrived in this country, never having had the privilege of attending school. Now there is a high school named for her back in her hometown in Germany.
She tours and tells her story not gratuitously or heroically. Besides the importance of the human history it bears witness to, it’s also timeless and adaptable to modern contexts of human nature. Repeatedly she stresses the importance to students of being kind and tolerant and welcoming to newcomers, as classmates were to her upon her arrival in a new land. And they listen!
The ovation when she stopped had barely subsided when the line to touch her formed. And then it fractured into a swarm around her. And the 77 year-old woman beamed like the seven year-old girl pictured on the cover of her book never could. Lucky her.
For the rest of the remarkable story of Marion Blumenthal Lazan click here: www.fourperfectpebbles.com.
