JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The school day began differently than usual for high school students at The Bolles School on Tuesday when they got to take a page right out of their history books as a Holocaust survivor shared his chilling experience during World War II.
Jack Mandelbaum told his story to the students on the Upper School San Jose campus as part of a special Education Week convocation event -- a story that the 90-year-old says gets more difficult to tell as he gets older and still haunts him to this day.
"They took healthy men, women and children and put them in gas chambers and 6 million Jews were killed -- that was 90 percent. Only 10 percent survived," Mandelbaum said. "We were sometimes 200-300 people in a barrack and we had to at 5 a.m. stand in front of the barrack and be counted during that time. A lot of people could barely stand up. Even some people who knew how horrible they looked, they would put paper in their mouths to make their faces look fuller and better."
He said the horrors still keep him up at night.
"From time to time, an officer would just point at you and had to step out and he just sentenced you to death because you're on the next transport to a gas chamber," he said.
Mandelbaum was 12 years old when he was ripped from his family in Poland by Nazis. He was thrown into seven different concentration camps, narrowly escaping death more than once.
"I never gave up hope that I would be reunited with my family and that's what kept me going," Mandelbaum said.
But he never did see his family again
"When my sister went to live with my aunt, that was the last time I saw her," Mandelbaum said.
Mandelbaum described the pain of when his family was ripped apart, which he says was one of the worst moments of his life.
"When I was coming from the ship and we docked, there were hundreds and hundreds of people at the dock with signs, 'Welcome, Joe,' 'Welcome, Bill,' etc. And I looked and no one was waiting for me, so I was very sad," he said.
The Holocaust ended when Mandelbaum was 17 years old. He then began a new life in America.
Mandelbaum, who now lives in south Florida, has now been involved in Holocaust education for nearly 40 years, speaking publicly about the dark reality of life as a Holocaust victim.
"People were dying, but they were still concerned that the world should know what happened and that was my way of honoring the pledge that we need to tell," he said.
Through it all, Mandelbaum said, he's never angry or filled with hate. He refused to give up hope and his goal is that students will do the same, even under the most horrific circumstances.
"I'm always optimistic that people are kind and good because I don't want to live in world where I would, everyday, think how horrible people are," he said.
Mandelbaum, a nonfiction main character of the book "Surviving Hitler," also visited Bolles Middle School Bartram Campus to tell his story.
By speaking to students across the county, Mandelbaum hopes he is contributing to making the world a better place and preventing history from repeating itself.