Holocaust survivor tells students to never forget

By: CRAIG SHULTZ - Staff Writer | Sunday, October 21, 2007 11:05 PM PDT ∞

WILDOMAR ---- As Renee Firestone told her story of being sent to a concentration camp during World War II, Elsinore High School senior Carlee Blakemore listened intently.

"We're the last generation that will get to hear this," Blakemore, 17, said after Firestone, 83, addressed a large group at the school Tuesday. "Our kids are going to have to learn this from history books."

Blakemore said seeing Firestone made the story of the extermination of about 6 million Jews during World War II real.

"It brings it out of the history books," she said. "It's right in front of you. There's no way to ignore it."

"This is the last generation (that will) hear from survivors," Firestone said at a potluck lunch after her talk. "It isn't whether they know enough (about the Holocaust), it's if they understand why we talk about it 63 years later.

"They have to do everything in the future to prevent it from happening again. That's what motivates me."

Firestone spent 13 months in the Auschwitz concentration camp and lost her parents and younger sister.

"Sitting here, 63 years later, I keep asking myself 'why me?'" Firestone told the crowd. "I keep wondering why did I survive.

"From Auschwitz, there are very few that left. Maybe I was saved for this," she said afterward about the frequent talks she gives.

Firestone was invited to speak to peer counselors and Associated Student Body officers at the school. A limousine was even sent to bring her to the school from her Beverly Hills home.

Firestone was asked to the school after Elsinore High counselor Cameron Lymon and some students heard her speak at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

Lymon said the students were taught about the Holocaust before the talk.

"We talk a lot about perseverance, resiliency," he said. "That made it easy to buy into what her story was."

Firestone spoke for about an hour, telling about World War II and eventually being sent to Auschwitz.

"It's very inspiring to me to look at her strength," Blakemore said.

Shayla Gray, a 17-year-old senior at Elsinore and a peer counselor for three years, said she could relate Firestone's story to today's students.

"A lot of our students put up boundaries every day," Gray said. "Miss Firestone would do anything not to be separated. ... After today, I don't think we'll be so separated."

The peer counselors help with teacher-student relationships and hold forums at the high school and other area campuses.

"People ask me, 'Why should we learn about the Holocaust today?'" Firestone told a theater full of students. "The Holocaust was the greatest human tragedy ever to happen to humanity. There are a lot of lessons to learn from the Holocaust. By me telling my story ... we hope to prevent future genocides. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened."

After coming to the United States in 1948, Firestone became an advocate for others in peril.

In the late 1960s, she testified in Washington, D.C., and at the United Nations about Cambodian children whose parents were killed by Pol Pot.

Shortly after testifying at the U.N., she learned that then-U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim had been a Nazi soldier.

"It was then that I promised myself I would talk about the Holocaust whenever I could," Firestone said. "Tell young children to understand what the lesson of the Holocaust is. We are all God's children and we are all our brother's keepers. Unless we learn to support each other, take care of each other, this world will be in bad shape."

Firestone told of being a 9-year-old in Czechoslovakia in 1933 when Adolf Hitler was elected head of Germany.

In 1939, Hungary took over Czechoslovakia, imposing the same anti-Jewish laws Hitler had, she said.

Firestone said German soldiers eventually came to her town and told the Jews they were being relocated to Germany, where they could work in factories and fields. She said she was looking forward to finding jobs for her father and herself to be able to take care of her mother and younger sister.

The Jews were given 24 hours to pack a suitcase and get to the train station, where they were herded onto cattle cars for what proved to be a 3 1/2-day ride not to Germany, but to Auschwitz.

As thousands of people poured off the train, Firestone, 20, was separated from her parents, but was able to stay with her sister, Clara, who was 14.

Firestone said a man was separating the people into groups, elderly and very young to one side, healthy men to another and young, healthy women to a third.

She later learned the man separating the people was the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, known as "the Angel of Death."

"I believed that was going to be the last day of my life," she told the students.

The women were finally allowed to shower and were sent to a barracks. As they saw flames and smoke coming out of other buildings, some women speculated the buildings were factories where they would work and others thought they were bakeries, Firestone said.

Firestone asked a guard when she would see her parents again.

"'You see the chimney and the smoke,'" she recalled the guard telling her. "'There are your parents. When you go through the chimney, you'll be reunited.'"

That's when she learned that she was at Auschwitz and the only way out was through the chimneys, where people were exterminated.