Holocaust survivors teach Maryland students about experiences

“It was not just the killer that killed,” she told the students, their eyes mesmerized by her. “Do we speak up for another human being?”

Godin’s father was killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, deported to the camp Nov. 5, 1943, when his daughter was 15.

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In 1944, Godin was taken to the Stutthof concentration camp, separated from her family and all her belongings. She became prisoner No. 54015.

She was given a dress, a pair of underwear and a pair of shoes and forced to dig cone-shaped holes in the ground.

“The labor was so hard,” she said, and people often died from starvation, exhaustion and diseases.

She began to pray for death, she said, but the women with her, who helped take care of her despite their own problems, said she had to live. Her life was a defeat against the Nazis, they told her.

“It was a miracle that I survived,” she said.

Godin has dedicated her work teaching about the Holocaust to those women, whom she credits with her survival, and wears her “remember’ pin in honor of them.

“When I put it on,” she said, “I always say, ‘Ladies, you helped me survive, and I remember you.’ ”

Mandel was the youngest survivor to address the students Tuesday.

He was raised in Budapest and was 8 when he was sent to Bergen-Belsen with his mother in 1944.

His father was drafted into a forced labor battalion that worked in Hungary and Ukraine, working at a very intermittent schedule — “as if he had been a traveling salesman.”

The three were reunited in 1946, and by 1949, they were all living in the United States.

In 2010, Mandel, his wife and his daughter visited Bergen-Belsen for the 65th anniversary of its liberation — an experience he called “more illuminating than anything else.”

The barracks that he and his mother had lived in were gone, and the only evidence left was parts of the foundation.

The main road outside his barracks looked like a golf course fairway, he said.

Godin told the students that it’s not enough to say “never again.” People have to take action.

There is still death, war and hate in the world. But she tells her story as a survivor of it all.

“Remember me,” Godin told the students. “Remember what I taught you.”