Holocaust survivor recalls horrors, speaks with students

Sixth-graders at Levy-Lakeside Elementary School in Merrick listened closely as Marion Blumenthal Lazan slowly told the story of her childhood years in a concentration camp during the Holocaust. The students looked up at her with curiosity as she softly spoke, her words lingering.

The children were silent while Lazan recounted the events of Nov. 9, 1938 — Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass” — which is considered the start of the Holocaust in Germany.

“People targeted stores owned by Jews and destroyed them, trashed them like they were meaningless,” she said.

That night, 4-year-old Marion learned that her father, Walter, had been taken by the Nazis. She, her brother, Albert, and her mother, Ruth, prepared for the worst.

Four Perfect Pebbles

Lazan’s entire family was eventually sent to the concentration camps. “While I was in Bergen-Belsen,” she said, “I had to find a way to entertain myself, so I invented a game called Four Perfect Pebbles. Each pebble represented a member of my family. If I found four pebbles that matched up perfectly, it meant my family would make it out of the concentration camps alive. But I cheated a lot. It was my game, so I could cheat if I wanted to.”

Lazan said she made up such games to keep herself occupied. The foul smell of rotting corpses was too much to bear, she said, so she had to keep her mind busy. “I didn’t want to think about anything bad, so I just kept playing my little games,” she said.

She detailed her experience as a child living in a concentration camp, choosing each word carefully. In January 1944, Lazan, her mother, father and brother were taken by train from Westerbork, Holland, to Bergen-Belsen in Germany. It was a particularly cold, dark night, she recalled.

“We were so cold, and they dragged us out of the [train] cart,” she said. “The guards yelled at us and scared us with rifles and German shepherds.” She still has a fear of German shepherds, she said.