Hard lessons of the past

Survivor gives firsthand account of the Holocaust

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Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

That is the lesson that Stanley Ronell, a Holocaust survivor and Long Islander, has devoted himself to teaching students across the country. Last week, Ronell visited Baldwin High School, where he shared with 10th-grade social studies and history classes his memories of surviving the worst genocide in recorded history, in which more than 6 million Jews and millions of non-Jews died.

Ronell was born in Krakow, Poland, in 1934, and was only 5 years old when Nazi German tanks and troops stormed across his homeland in 1939, defeating the Polish army in a matter of weeks. Ronell recounted those terrible days for the students.

Andie Floresta, 22, a 10th-grade teacher at the high school, arranged for Ronell’s visit. “I heard him when I was an undergrad at Molloy College in my Critical Issues of Education class,” Floresta said. As soon as she was hired at Baldwin High, she knew she had to bring in Ronell.

“I knew right off the bat that this was something I wanted to happen,” Floresta said. “Once you hear [his story], it’s like you’re a witness.”

Students had an opportunity to ask the 83-year-old questions about his life in Poland and Hungary during the war.

In chilling detail, Ronell described the atrocities he witnessed as the Nazis invaded his home city, and Jews and other disenfranchised minorities were rounded up and shipped to concentration camps, where they were enslaved or executed. His own father died in Auschwitz, he said.

Ronell dared the students to envision buses full of their own families and friends shipped off suddenly and inexplicably to an unknown fate. A heavy silence filled the room.

“The Holocaust didn’t begin with murder. It began with hate,” he said. He urged the students not to go through life apathetically. If they see a wrong, he said, they must act to right it.

“I think this is a wonderful school,” Eileen Ronell, Stanley’s wife, said of Baldwin High. The students “were absolutely wonderful. They were very respectful, and hopefully they came away with something.”

She has accompanied her husband to many presentations over the years, and said she could tell just by watching how absorbed the Baldwin students were in his account. “You could tell by the way they behaved,” she said. “You didn’t hear a sound, so to me that tells me that they were very interested in what he had to say.”

“The presentation was a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” said Daiquon Campbell, 15.

His class has been studying World War II, including the Holocaust. “I was pretty excited to actually have the experience to see a Holocaust survivor,” Daiquon said. “Seeing someone right in front of me who survived the Holocaust is just a beautiful experience, [better] than just reading about it in a textbook.”

“I’ve spoken to close to 16,000 student and adult groups,” Ronell said. “To me it’s a labor of love.”