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THOMPSON --- Students at Marianapolis Preparatory School were visibly moved and inspired by author and holocaust survivor Marion Blumenthal Lazan. Lazan visited the school with her husband Nathanial recently. She began her presentation with the words, “Mine is a story Anne Frank might have told if she survived.”
The now 76-year-old Lazan was just a child when her family was forced to leave their home and live in German prison camps during World War II. There, says Lazan, “death was a daily occurrence. It became normal.” She shared the horrific conditions under which they lived, crammed 600 into bunkhouses meant for 100, spending hours in the elements with no food, warm clothing or sanitation, and the ever-present threat of death in the form of the mass graves and deportation to death camps.
Lazan and her mother, father and brother spent six-and-a-half years imprisoned under the Nazi regime. The Blumenthals were forced to live in refugee, transit, and prison camps that included Westerbork in Holland, and the notorious Bergen-Belsen in Germany. They spent 14 months at Bergen-Belsen, where child author Anne Frank was interred and died. Lazan’s book is named for the “four perfect pebbles” she sought to gather each day on the barren grounds of the camp, symbolizing that her wish that her mother, father, brother and she would survive.
The Blumenthal family did survive the camps, although Lazan’s father, Walter Blumenthal, succumbed to typhus six weeks after liberation. Three years later Lazan, her brother Albert, and their mother obtained the necessary papers and boarded a ship for the United States.
Lazan has travelled throughout the world to tell of her experiences, chronicled in her book “Four Perfect Pebbles.” To date she estimates she has spoken with 1 million people and counting. Lazan says it has not gotten any easier to tell her story, but what motivates her to keep going, is the thought that this generation will be the very last to hear first hand about the atrocities of the Holocaust.
In her introduction, Assistant Head of School Karen Tata described Lazan’s presentation as “a story of sadness and suffering, but it is also a story of courage, and the will to survive. Mrs. Lazan is one of the few people left who can speak to the horrors families faced during this savage time. In teaching our future leaders about this time in history we are ensuring it won’t be repeated.”
Lazan asked the audience to be tolerant of others and not to stereotype individuals based on religious belief, color, race or national origin. She stressed the importance of positive thinking as well as creativity and inner-strength when working to overcome adversity. She warned students to be true to themselves and not blindly follow any leader.
Lazan has been back to Germany six times, the first time in 1995, some 50 years after leaving, and recently her hometown named a school in her name. “I have met people who have renewed my faith in humanity, she says.
Today she has spoken at over 1,000 schools. Each time, she resolutely summarizes what she learned from her family’s experience: “ Know this. No one is spared adversity, but with perseverance and determination and faith and above all hope you can overcome anything!”