Published: 26 January 2012
by GEORGIA GRAHAM and SUSANNAH BUTTER

HOLOCAUST survivor Marion Blumenthal Lazan kept her voice calm and clear as she described the scrap of yellow material she held up in front of the audience of 200 students.

The yellow Star of David – embroidered in black with the word “Juden” – had been stitched into her clothes when she was just four years old in Bremen, Germany.

Mrs Blumenthal Lazan told pupils at Camden School for Girls in Camden Town that it dated back to when she was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with her mother Marion, brother Albert and father Walter.

Even as the bell for break rang on Monday, students at the Sandal Road school remained captivated by her story which took the family from Germany to transit camps in Holland and eventually to Bergen-Belsen.

She survived, somehow, until the last days of the war when the train the family were on, heading to the eastern European death camps, was liberated by Russian troops.

Ending an inspiring talk, Mrs Blumenthal Lazan brought out a picture of her 104-year-old mother – a “remarkable” woman who is still alive and well in the United States – and told the gathered teenagers to “check in with your mums and dads always”. She added: “It is your duty to tell them where you are going and when you will be back.”

In the run-up to Holocaust Memorial Day tomorrow (Friday), students at Parliament Hill school were also visited by a survivor.

Susan Pollack, 78, told girls in Year 9 how her family were forced to leave their home near Budapest one night in 1944 when she was 10 years old.

Ms Pollack and her brother were among the last people to be taken to Auschwitz.

They never saw their parents again and do not even have photographs of them because their home was ransacked.

Students heard how Ms Pollack was transported from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen and then freed when the British liberated the camp in 1945.

“We were emaciated, no one could walk or speak and we had nowhere to go,” she said.

Ms Pollack, who now lives in Canada and has six grandchildren, added: “It is important to speak out and warn young people about what hate and racism can do.”