Speakers at Schools Present Large-as-Life History Lessons

It is not as if the eighth-grade students at Blackstock Junior High School were unaware of the Holocaust before Bernd Simon came to visit.

They had read “The Diary of Anne Frank.” And many of the youngsters at the south Oxnard junior high had toured the Museum of Tolerance in West Los Angeles, a testament to the horrors of war and the evils of the Nazi empire.

But few had ever met anyone like Simon, or heard firsthand about the depths of human savagery and suffering that washed over Germany more than half a century ago.

They had never heard anyone tap personal experience to recount life in a Jewish ghetto or recall a terrifying train ride to one of Hitler’s death camps, with its electrified fences and machine-gun towers.

And they had never been told that now--as the pool of Holocaust survivors shrinks year after year and time accomplishes what Hitler could not--they are as responsible as anyone else for keeping these stories alive.

“I’m going to tell you the way it was,” the 77-year-old Ventura resident told the youngsters, beginning a presentation he has delivered dozens of times over the past decade to hundreds of Ventura County schoolchildren.

“Everything I tell you is the truth--I won’t make it better and I won’t make it worse,” he said. “Don’t let people tell you the Holocaust didn’t happen. I know it happened. I was there.”

Simon is among more than 60 participants in a county school program that funnels senior citizens into classrooms to share their experiences and help bridge the gap with a younger generation.

One of only 11 such programs statewide, the Seasons program has operated in Ventura County for 16 years, funded by a $15,000 state grant.

The program actually started informally decades ago at Leisure Village, where senior citizens would host high school groups to discuss educational issues.

Since then it has grown into a full-fledged speakers’ bureau, with senior citizens available for classroom discussions on everything from careers in the Peace Corps to the stock market, shipbuilding and the operation of the space shuttle.

Among the most popular speakers are people such as Simon, those who serve as human history books and breathe life into the world-shaping events that most students only get to read about.

“It’s one thing to read about these things in a book, but when you hear about them from someone who has firsthand experience, it really makes a lasting impression,” said Alice Sweetland, who runs the program for the Ventura County superintendent of schools. “Our volunteers might be retired, but they still have a lot to give to the community, and it keeps them vital.”

Thousand Oaks resident Walter Stein, 72, said that was part of the reason he volunteered for the program two years ago.

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But the Holocaust survivor said he also wanted to ensure that the genocide would never be forgotten and that youngsters would feel compelled to carry on that message in a world where memory is short.

“I feel it’s very important to keep the story alive, and I lay it on the students to carry that knowledge forward,” said Stein, whose parents died at Auschwitz after he and his brother fled Germany with the help of a Jewish organization in New York.

“When people start talking about 5 million or 6 million, it’s a statistic,” Stein said. “But if you bring it to them as a survivor, as a man whose life suffered through this period, then it becomes more personal to them.”

Ventura resident Peter Wygle, 67, joined the program at the start of the school year, sharing his experiences as a prisoner of war after the Japanese occupied the Philippine Islands.

He was there with his family in a mining camp, where his father served as an engineer. It was 1941 and he was 11 years old, about the same age as the junior high school students he was talking to on a recent morning at Blackstock Junior High School.

“I went in about the same time you went into junior high, and I was out in about the same time you will leave this school,” Wygle told the youngsters.

He brought out a clutch of knitting needles, carved by his father out of bamboo and used by women at the camp to create T-shirts and sweaters. By the time U.S. forces liberated the islands three years later, Wygle said, there were 3,000 sets of knitting needles.

“It’s good to appreciate what you have, because you never know when it’s going to change,” Wygle said. “We had some rough times, but generally it worked out as well as could be expected.”

Eighth-grade literature teacher Marsha Brumana said her students wrote letters to Wygle and Simon after the men shared their wartime experiences.

“I think it makes it real for the kids,” Brumana said. “When you just read about it in history books or literature books, it’s easy for the kids to think this was so long ago, maybe it’s not real at all. I think this helps the kids believe these things really happened.”

If that is the case, Bernd Simon said, the program is paying off in a big way. Above everything else, he said, it is important for the youngsters to know that their history lessons are real, that there was a mass extermination of Jews and other minorities.

And that it all happened less than 60 years ago as an entire nation looked on and did nothing to stop it.

Simon was among the first Jews rounded up as the Holocaust began, and was sent to the Nazis’ Dachau death camp. He was there for about three months before escaping through a forged letter penned by his mother, promising that he had an exit visa waiting for him at a foreign embassy.

His mother was not so fortunate. She died in 1941 aboard a train to Nazi-occupied Russia.

“I was so lucky, I feel guilty sometimes,” said Simon, who said he couldn’t even tell the story during his first two or three years in the program without choking up. “But this is a true story. This is not a Hollywood dream, or Hollywood makeup. And students should know this story so it doesn’t happen again.”

FYI

The Ventura County superintendent of schools has senior citizens available to speak on a variety of topics. Educators interested in having a Seasons speaker in the classroom should call Alice Sweetland at 388-4410.