Holocaust survivor visits PBS

• By STEVEN WARD
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 3, 2009 - Page: 1B

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Eighth-grader Morgan Friedmann asked Holocaust survivor Marion Blumenthal Lazan what her feelings were about the Germans in the aftermath of what happened in World War II.

“You would like for me to forgive them, wouldn’t you? No. They can never be forgiven. For the ones directly involved in what happened, it will never be forgotten. It was not an accident,” Lazan told Parkview Baptist School middle-school students Monday.

Lazan co-wrote a memoir, “Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story,” about how she, her parents and brother survived concentration camps in Holland and Germany, including the Bergen-Belsen camp, when she was 9 years old.

“I’m here to share a story that Anne Frank might have told if she survived,” Lazan told the students.

Lazan, her parents Ruth and Walter, and her brother, Albert, lived in Germany during the 1930s.

Lazan said anti-Semitism in Germany swelled in 1935 when Lazan said Jews were outlawed from parks, pools, theaters and had to adhere to an evening curfew.

On Nov. 9, 1938, known as “Crystal Night,” Nazis smashed the windows of Jewish-owned businesses and charged the cost to the Jews in a tax, Lazan said.

“That’s when the verbal and physical assault really began,” Lazan said.

Lazan’s family secured transportation and the proper paperwork to go to the United States and went to Holland where they waited to go.

During May 1940, the Germans invaded Holland and the Blumenthals were sent to the Westerbork concentration camp in Holland.

Lazan said she remembers families getting on trains every Tuesday morning — trains headed to extermination camps.

When the Blumenthals were later shipped to Bergen-Belsen in Germany, Lazan said, Nazi soldiers dragged them and other families out of train cars and threatened them with dogs. She said she still has a fear of German shepherds to this day.

Lazan recalled watching wagons pass through the camp with what she thought was firewood and later learning that what she thought was firewood were naked bodies piled on top of each other.