By Pamela McLoughlin, Register Staff

MILFORD — With a screen bearing the chilling image of Adolph Hitler as her backdrop, Holocaust survivor Anita Schorr told 11th-graders at Platt Technical High school of the dehumanization and torture she experienced and witnessed as a child in two concentration camps.

As Schorr’s story unfolded, students also learned her parents, in their 40s, and her little brother were killed by the Nazis before she was freed.

Childhood for Schorr essentially ended at age 8. She was liberated just shy of 15.

Schorr, 80, of Westport, spoke in detail about the all-consuming pain of hunger; the demoralization of victims so weak they could barely walk, yet for the entertainment of SS soldiers, they were made to move piles of rocks back and forth for no reason. The horror of human beings being purposely exposed to diseases such as hepatitis and scarlet fever so they could serve as experiments. Men, women, children being brought to gas chambers that looked like showers — they never knew for sure which it was. The sight of that black cloud of smoke that eerily hung in the sky after people were put into ovens.

Schorr stressed at several junctures during her talk that while all of it happened, “the whole world turned their back,” because the free world didn’t think it could be true.

Schorr was invited to Platt by the school’s Diversity Team. Once she began talking, the auditorium of hundreds of 11th-graders was silent until she finished to thunderous applause and a standing ovation.

A native of Czechoslovakia, Schorr survived the Jewish ghetto, Terezin, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps with the right moves, determination and hope.

During selection at Auschwitz when she was a young teen, the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele grouped her with the young and old, the group that would soon be heading to their deaths.

To escape the gas chambers, she ran to the latrine unnoticed and was able to slip through the second group, claiming to be 18 and afterward, hiding her undeveloped body from Mengele when she was sent in front of him with clothes off. Continued...

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There was hard labor every day. The quarters were cramped, wet and cold. They lived with rats the size of cats.

“You never knew when the hunger would overcome you, a bomb will hit you or you step out of line and you’ll be shot,” Schorr said. The camp she was in was liberated April 15, 1945 by the British allies.

“When I entered the hospital, I said to myself, ‘I made it, I made it’ and I was going to enter the human race.”

Schorr joined the underground Israeli army, participating in the War of Independence and said she healed her soul and her body. Later, she married an American.

She once ended her talks at schools by imploring students “not to forget,” but said that’s not good enough anymore.

“I’m begging for action,” she said.

She urged students to step in if they see someone being bullied because of their race, appearance or other qualities.

“We must all of us take the future in our hands,” Schorr said. “Only this way, can we hope for a better world.”

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