Students enrolled in Lower Merion High School’s 10^th grade Global Studies Two course had the rare privilege of hearing a first-hand account of the Holocaust, directly from a survivor, Peter Stern.

Stern shares his story as part of the Holocaust Awareness Museum and Education Center’s Witness to History Project.

The students paid rapt attention as Stern shared that one of his earliest memories of his childhood in Nuremberg, Germany, was boys around his own age throwing stones at him and his younger brother Sam, when they were both preschoolers.

When he was just five years old, his family was deported from Germany to Latvia, first to a holding camp and then to the Riga ghetto. His father, who was an auto mechanic, worked for the German army for no pay. The following year, the family was moved to a work camp in Russia, and then back to Riga, where they all lived together in a prison cell.

In 1944, the family was moved again. Stern’s father, Artur, was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp where he died. Stern, along with his mother, Karolina, and brother Sam, were moved to Ravensbrück and then Bergen-Belsen, from which they were liberated by British troops in 1945.

Finally, after living for a while in Nuremberg in what had been an old-age home and then a displaced persons camp, the family was able to enter the United States, under the sponsorship of distant relatives in Georgia.

He went on to graduate from the University of Missouri with a degree in metallurgical engineering. He got married, became and father and grandfather. His brother became a college professor.

After hearing his story, the students asked many thoughtful questions, including whether he ever considered moving to Israel, whether he still speaks German, whether he thinks people should boycott companies that still exist today that used slave labor during World War Two, and whether he followed the Nuremberg trials.

After patiently answering the questions, Stern left the students with what he said was the most important lesson they could learn from his story – that each one of them has a responsibility to treat others the way they want to be treated and to practice empathy, so that what happened to the victims of the Holocaust does not happen again. He noted that the people responsible for what happened to his family were his neighbors and fellow countrymen, who did not heed that lesson.

You can see photos of the assembly here. To see other recent events related to Jewish American Heritage Month (JAHM), click the links below!

• Weitzman Museum Educators Bring Jewish History to Life at BHES
• 6th Graders Explore Jewish History Through Partnership with Weitzman Museum
• Holocaust Survivor Ronnie Breslow Shares Powerful Testimony at Harriton & LM
• Weitzman Museum Brings Jewish History to Life for District Fourth Graders