Holocaust Memories Still Vivid : Schools: A survivor and a World War II veteran share painful experiences with 350 students at John Muir, marking Yom Hashoah.

Holocaust survivor Sidonia Lax lifted a red apple high enough for a standing-room-only audience of eighth-graders to see. Lax, 66, said in a voice that cracked with emotion that apples always remind her of her father’s death.

“To my father it was very important that I get a few vitamins,” Lax said, explaining how her father would steal food for his Jewish family in Nazi Germany. “All my life I remember my daddy died when he went to get an apple for me.”

Lax was speaking Monday to 350 students at John Muir Middle School to mark Yom Hashoah, a monthlong memorial held annually to commemorate the Holocaust. Her appearance--and that of World War II veteran Chez Cheslow, who was part of an Allied troop that liberated German death camps at the end of the war--was sponsored by the Burbank Human Relations Council.

Students wiped away tears as Lax described how her father, who had hid the family in an underground bunker, was captured by a German guard when he attempted to get food for her, his only child. He later died in a concentration camp.

In all, Lax lost 60 relatives in the Holocaust, she told the students.

Stephen Payne waited in line with several other students after the talk to speak to Lax. He said he wanted to ask her for her address.

“I’m going to write to her and tell her I’m sorry it happened and I don’t want it to happen again,” Payne said.

Cheslow, 69, explained to the students that his army unit didn’t know about Nazi death camps until a tank he was in crashed through a chain-link fence surrounding Dachau in 1945. Inside the camp they found hundreds of emaciated Jews.

“If you can imagine what we thought when we saw that these peoples’ knees were bigger than their thigh bone, and their elbow joint was bigger than their upper arm,” he said.

Cheslow, who said he still cannot bring himself to reminisce about the emotionally charged liberation with other veterans, urged students to seek racial harmony and to challenge those who say the Holocaust never occurred.

His message had meaning for Brienne Tucker, 14, who said she believed similar events could take place today.

“There are a lot of racist people at my school, everyone talks about everyone else,” she said. “I don’t think I have the power to stop it, but I would try to defend my friends no matter what their race is.”

Presentations by other Holocaust survivors will be given in Burbank to eighth-graders at Luther Burbank Middle School on Wednesday and to 11th-grade classes at John Burroughs High School on Friday.

The program focuses on eighth- and 11th-grade students in the Burbank Unified School District because eighth-graders are reading Anne Frank’s diary and 11th-graders are studying World War II, said Sylvia Sutton, Yom Hashoah committee coordinator for the council.