VENTURA : 2 Witnesses to Nazi Atrocities Educate Class

A class of eighth-graders sat absorbed in silence Wednesday, listening to a history lesson from two 74-year-old teachers who were witnesses to Nazi atrocities.

Bernd Simon of Ventura told of his youth as a Jewish student in Nazi Germany, his time in the Dachau concentration camp, and his return to Germany as a military intelligence officer hunting Nazi war criminals.

Robert Hasen of Camarillo told of being the first member of the western allied forces to liberate a concentration camp.

The Balboa Middle School students listened intently to the speakers, part of a new holocaust education program that includes visits by all Ventura eighth-graders to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

Hasen and Simon were talking about events that happened in Europe half a century ago. But the students had no trouble relating the lessons of tolerance to present day Ventura County school yards.

“There’s a lot of name-calling and picking fights,” said John Dennison, 14, who said the tales of Nazi discrimination reminded him of kids at his school who taunt each other.

Another student, Chris Pettit, said he found the Nazis reminiscent of present day gangs.

Hasen made the eighth-graders cringe by including the gory details of the liberation of the Ohrduf camp in southern Germany on April 4, 1945--including his discovery of two naked dead men in one room of the camp hanging from meat hooks.

That particular incident was the focus of the majority of the students’ questions.

Simon brought a stack of documentary evidence, including the last letter he received from his mother, who was killed in the holocaust. Students carefully handled Simon’s battered olive green German passport, marked with a swastika on the cover.

Simon said that after receiving a visa to immigrate from Germany to Cuba, he entered the German Embassy in Cuba, gave the desk attendant a “Heil Hitler” salute, and asked for a one-year renewal of the passport. As Simon prepared to dash out the door of the embassy, afraid that he would be sent back to a German concentration camp along with his passport, the clerk returned with his extended passport.

Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Cuba had told Simon that he had to renew his expired German passport before they could give him a visa to enter the United States, where he joined the army “to fight back,” he said.

Hasen urged the group of about 60 students to remember his words, and beware of neo-Nazi revisionist groups.

“I’m 74 years old, and when I’m gone, who is left?” he asked. “Who is left to stave off and fight off these idiots who are claiming that this thing never happened?”