Holocaust survivor relives history with Utah students
Peter Daniels, on screen, talks via Skype with students at T.H. Bell Junior High about his experience as a child in the Holocaust on Thursday, April 16, 2015. Daniels was born in Berlin and sent to a concentration camp at the age of six. He spoke with the students on Yom Hashoah, the international day of remembrance for the Holocaust.
Peter Daniels, on screen, talks via Skype with students at T.H. Bell Junior High about his experience as a child in the Holocaust on Thursday, April 16, 2015. At the age of six, Daniels was sent to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Of the 15,000 children who were sent to the camp during World War II, Daniels was one of 100 who survived. He spoke with the students on Yom Hashoah, the international day of remembrance for the Holocaust.
Ashlyn Thorngren, Kiera Ryan and Makayla Satterlee listen as Peter Daniels his childhood as a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany at T.H. Bell Junior High on Thursday, April 16, 2015.
Peter Daniels, on screen, talks via Skype with students at T.H. Bell Junior High about his experience as a child in the Holocaust on Thursday, April 16, 2015. Daniels lives in Los Angeles and spoke with the school through a partnership with the Museum of Tolerance.
WASHINGTON TERRACE — Monique Benard, an eighth-grade English teacher at T.H. Bell Junior High, can still remember her range of feelings when she took her own children to the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, where visitors get a very real impression of what things were like for victims of the Holocaust during World War II.
She wanted her students to have those same experiences, but knew she couldn’t take them to the museum so far away. She did the next best thing — she brought it to them using technology. About 200 students spent Thursday morning hearing in great detail the experiences of Holocaust survivor Peter Daniels via Skype as he talked to students and answered questions from the museum in Los Angeles.
Students have been reading “The Book Thief” and “Diary of Anne Frank” in their classes and have been talking a about World War II and what Holocaust victims went through.
Students were quiet and rapt as Daniels spoke to them for over an hour. Students also dressed up to show respect for Daniels. Daniels detailed what it was like when the Gestapo officers came knocking on his door when he was at home alone while his mother worked. He told the students about how the officers checked through his bags once he got to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. “They didn’t want to take your photo albums or things like that but they wanted the things of value like jewelry,” Daniels said. He remembers that one of the guards took most of his clothing because the guard had a 7-year-old son, the same age Daniels was when he got to the camp.
Daniels spent two years in the camp and saw his mother occasionally, although he told the students he had a strained relationship with his mother because she hadn’t treated him well while he was growing up.
He talked about how the beds were triple-stacked and how rough the living conditions were. “We fought over the blankets and some kids did not wake up in the morning,” he said. Many of the people in his camp were shipped to Auschwitz. “If you went to Auschwitz it was a death sentence. You knew you were going to die,” he said.
He did work while he was there, calling himself a “human conveyor belt,” but said he liked doing the work because it kept him busy. “Otherwise you were waiting for food or waiting to die,” he said.
He still remembers when they found out they would be freed and the relief that he had survived, although life still wasn’t easy for him. He was homeless on the streets of Berlin for some time and was abandoned by his mother. She returned, remarried and soon their family was sponsored by an American family and were able to come to the United States. He remembers seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time and the exhilaration he felt and the freedom.
As Daniels spoke to the students about his own experience, he also gave them facts about the Holocaust. “The Jews were not the only people who suffered. Many others suffered and I want you to understand that,” he said.
Students had many questions for him. One student asked if he had been back to Europe. He said he has several times, but on his most recent visit he noticed that some of those old negative attitudes about Jewish people are starting to seep back in the culture, much of those attitudes coming from the Middle East. “This is why these things are important so that you know the history and so it doesn’t happen again,” Daniels said.
Benard agreed. She said she wants her students to know it and to feel those feelings so history will never repeat itself.
Student Austin Noorda videoed the whole speech because he knew many parents would want to watch it. “It was pretty incredible and pretty cool that we at such a small school were able to meet someone who endured such a tragedy,” Noorda said.
“It’s amazing to me how he was so little and he survived, yet others who had so much didn’t,” student Brenton Gardiner said.
Student Tommy Clarke couldn’t believe they were able to see someone who had survived the Holocaust. “It was cool because it was so long ago and we could actually talk to him,” Clarke said.
Benard hopes to be able to use the same technology to bring other guest speakers to her classroom. “There are all sorts of programs that I am looking into,” she said.
Benard said district user support specialist Brent Moser made it happen. He did a trial run to make sure it would work, but it he said it went off perfectly.
