Holocaust Survivor Shares Story with Goodrell Students
Holocaust survivor Marion Blumenthal Lazan hugs a student after her presentation at Goodrell Middle School.
Not long after Marion Blumenthal Lazan’s last visit to Goodrell Middle School three years ago her mother, Ruth, passed away at the age of 104. The mother who was liberated, along with her husband Walter and their children, Marion and her brother Albert, in 1945 while riding a Nazi transport train between concentration camps. At that time Ruth Blumenthal weighed 60 pounds after six years in the camps. Ten year-old Marion weighed all of 35.
Wednesday morning Mrs. Lazan returned to Goodrell for her fourth visit. Besides the death of her titanic mother the only other change in her remarkable personal story is the addition of a second great-granddaughter since she was here last. A wide circle of life with Marion still at its center; still making the rounds bearing witness to the horrific story of the Holocaust to the last generation that will ever hear it firsthand.
“I’m sure you have studied about it,” she said to her latest audience. “I’m sure you have seen films and read books. But the stench of death that was everywhere is indescribable. There are no words for that.”
Nodding toward her husband of more than 60 years, Nathaniel, Mrs. Lazan says “We schlep a lot,” as she rattles off their busy itinerary for the next couple of months. Even all these decades later, schlepping must still feel like a great freedom to someone whose childhood was ringed by barbed wire. And telling the story still feels like a duty to generations beyond those two beautiful great-granddaughters.
For more of the story Marion Blumenthal Lazan lives to tell, visit her web site Four Perfect Pebbles.
