Holocaust survivor shares experience with Florida students

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Students astatine a schoolhouse adjacent West Palm Beach heard a first-hand relationship from a Holocaust subsister connected Friday.

Manny Gurowski, 90, spoke astatine Oxbridge Academy and shared his communicative of survival.

Gurowski discussed however helium hid successful basements, traded soap for breadstuff to attraction for his sick sister, and came to America with conscionable $5 successful his pocket.

"Most of the radical got shot, and I'm the fortunate 1 that survived," Gurowski said.

Gurowski said his beingness successful Germany started to alteration astir 1937. That's erstwhile connected the archetypal time of schoolhouse successful Germany, helium was told by his teacher to permission and ne'er travel backmost due to the fact that helium was Jewish.

After that occurrence, helium said things got worse, and his household was taken to a labour campy to marque ammunition for the German army.

"It became precise communal to spot bodies each implicit the place. They were stacked similar cordwood," Gurowski said of his years astatine the campy astatine what is present Kaliningrad, Russia.

He and his chap prisoners were subjected to inhumane conditions.

"A beingness didn't mean anything, nothing, adjacent successful this labour ghetto. Every greeting erstwhile you enactment up, the Germans are celebrated for counting, and you basal determination for hours, and radical would illness close adjacent to you, and they conscionable kick, and they're done oregon a slug successful the head," Gurowski said.

He and his household survived the atrocities and were yet freed by the Russian Army, aboriginal emigrating to the U.S.

South Florida has galore Holocaust survivors, and arsenic they turn older, determination is simply a propulsion to sphere their stories.

"I judge idiosyncratic looked implicit my shoulder," Gurowski said. "I deliberation that’s what pulled maine through."

On Friday, students astatine Oxbridge besides experienced a virtual circuit of the Auschwitz and Birkenau attraction camps, wherever the decease toll included astir 1 cardinal Jews.

Gurowski's sojourn to the schoolhouse is portion of Oxbridge Academy's summertime speechmaking program, including books that addressed the Holocaust.

He said helium enjoys telling his communicative to a caller procreation and preserving the representation of what happened.

"I privation them to cognize however fortunate they are," Gurowski said.

Friday's presumption astatine Oxbridge Academy was arranged by the Jewish Student Union and Southern NCSY.

Matt Sczesny and Scott Sutton astatine WPTV archetypal reported this story.