Countywide : Man Tells Students of Holocaust

Out of the Black Forest in Germany a man approached on his knees, his head shaved and his body withered to a mere 60 or 70 pounds.

Crying and begging for food, the man crawled to the feet of American soldier Robert Hasen, then 23.

“That’s an incident that’s remained with me for all of my life,” Hasen, now a 71-year-old Camarillo resident, tells students throughout Ventura County.

Hasen still remembers the horrible odor that hung in the air that April day in 1945. Hours later, he and his small Army troop traced the smell to Ohrdurf, the first Nazi concentration camp to be liberated by Americans.

Walking into a bunker, Hasen said he was astounded by the inhuman living conditions and physical states of the starved survivors. “All I could see looking up at the bunks were eyes,” he said. “When the human body shrinks, everything grows smaller--except for the eyes.”

Hasen now shares these memories, describing them in vivid and often graphically disturbing detail, as part of a program called SEASONS, or Senior Experts And Speakers On Numerous Subjects. The program sends senior citizens with intriguing life experiences into the county’s kindergarten to junior college classrooms.

The program, funded by a $17,000 state grant through the county superintendent of schools office, is looking to expand the program to more than the 40 volunteers who now participate.

Hasen pleads with students not to believe those who claim that the mass murders of 14 million people, 6 million of them Jews, never occurred. “I am one of the last witnesses to document this,” he said. “Who will do it when I’m gone? It’s up to you. It’s up to your generation. We can’t be indifferent. We can’t afford to be.”

Hasen conveyed this message recently to hundreds of students at Rio Mesa High School in Oxnard as he held up an anti-Semitic newsletter, published by a skinhead group about six years ago and found in a Rio Mesa student’s locker.

Paul Petrich, world civilization teacher at Rio Mesa, said he knows some students who are either sympathetic to white supremacist views or are confused about what to think when exposed to them.

Petrich said he watched those students’ faces as they listened to Hasen, and believes that his presentation did some good.

“They sat and they paid attention,” he said. “This thing hit home. . . . This is what education is supposed to be.”

Rio Mesa student Rick Hagson, 16, thanked Hasen after the presentation. Hagson said his brother had described the Holocaust to him, but he could not believe that it could have happened.

But Hagson said Hasen’s descriptions of the mass murders were so vivid that now, he could imagine the horrors. “It’s as if you were there,” he said.