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welcome to greensburg trinity high school auditorium. i am the principal and we are flattered to have everyone here for our annual chautauqua program and we are excited about this year's guess. i would like to welcome mr. john pratt to the stage to begin our program today. >> good morning. on october 19 2018 a philadelphia newspaper ran an opinion article entitled, why we need holocaust education now more than ever. according to the anti-defamation league anti-

semetic incidents rose nearly 60% between 2016 and 2017. that is the largest single year jump the organization has ever recorded. understanding how and why the holocaust occurred helps to demonstrate not only the horrors that humans are capable of in desperate conditions but also the hope that can survive even the most terrifying trauma. teaching students about the holocaust shows the dangers of prejudice and how dehumanization and scapegoating are used to advance an agenda. it is one thing to read about the holocaust in the history book or listen to a teacher lecture about it. it is completely another to experience history through the eyes of a survivor and to hear the stories first-hand. nine days after this was written

on the other side of pennsylvania in pittsburgh a gunman walked into the tree of life congregation synagogue and killed 11 people. this was the worst attack on worshiping jewish people in american history. holocaust education is absolutely necessary today. that is why i am honored to introduce you to frank grunwald, a holocaust survivor who is here today to share his story with all of you. let's give a nice greensburg high school welcome to mr. frank grunwald. >> thank you john. can you all hear me? okay. i want to thank john pratt and the faculty for arranging this seminar.

i think it is a good idea. i am honored to be here. as you can probably tell i have done this before so i am not too nervous or excited. basically what i am going to talk about is my personal experience and my families experience during world war ii. i was only nine or 10 and 11 and 12 years old when this was going on. i was just a young kid and much younger than most of you in the room. i do remember all of the important things that happened, i have forgotten some of the details and a couple of things i want to mention to you is that the photographs you are going to see here these are readily available over the internet,

they are there are three types of photographs. some of them were taken by german military or the german ss and were found shortly after the war, there is another group that was taken by american soldiers when they walked into some of these camps and again they are available through the internet. there is a third segment of photographs that came from my family that survived the war. they were taken care of by a housekeeper of hours that worked for my grandparents and she kept them through the war and after the war she gave us the photographs. there is two

types of information i'm going to give your. one is the type i remember directly and the second type, which is also really interesting is information that we found out after the war. this is information that came from german documents and american documents, things we did not know about while we were in the camps. with that there is only one really important thing i want to mention to you and that is the story you are going to hear is typical rather than a typical. it is typical. by that i mean most jewish families went through this type of experience. what is not typical in this story is the fact that as a 910 11 and 12-year-old that i survived. as you may know most 11 and 12-year-olds did not

survive. children were the primary target of or jewish children were the primary target of the regime so they wanted to basically kill as many jewish children as possible. 1 1/2 million roughly jewish children died during the holocaust. that is a huge number just imagine one and half million jewish children, it is like if everybody in indianapolis was a child today and i am talking about greater indianapolis including the suburbs and imagine everyone is a child and everybody is living there right now is killed. that is the number of jewish children that were killed between say 1939 and 1944 in a matter of 4 1/2 years.

so with that introduction here is the town where i grew up as a child. it is the city of prague in czechoslovakia. it is an old city with a lot of beautiful old and gothic architecture. this is a dirty apartment house which looks really dirty and grubby right now in this picture. the reason it is dirty and grubby is because this picture was taken immediately after the communist regime folded in the late 1990s and it was not taking care of. was an apartment building that

belonged to my grandparents and it has now been fixed up and painted and it looks like a new building. my family was living on the second floor and you can see that rectangular white window. that was actually my room, my brother and i used that bedroom and the rest of the apartment belonged to my parents where my father and mother were living. my dad was a physician he was a doctor and he had his office as part of the apartment as well. we grew up in this is sort of embarrassing but we grew up not even realizing we were jewish because we were not practicing juice -- jews. we were brought up in sort of a universal religious philosophy of ethics behavior, how you

treat other people, how much you need to respect other people regardless of who they are so it was a very universal religious dogma that was taught to us by our mother mostly. on march 15, 1939 when i was about 6 1/2 years old when the occupied czechoslovakia it was really a surprise and it was also a surprise that we found out that everybody suddenly became very anti-jewish and we saw signs all over the city like jews not allowed in front of the public library and in front of the coffeehouses and cinema. it was in german and checklist of ocular czechoslovakia signs

that said not allowed. we were shocked when my brother and i walked one day march 15, 1939, we were going out to play in a nearby park and we were shocked to see this foreign peace of military equipment that was set up on a river bank about two blocks from our house . we were surprised to see this huge gun and behind the gun was a soldier and we later found out it was a german soldier and when we got home that same day that afternoon we found out that we are suddenly occupied by germany by thegovernment of germany . everything just

suddenly started happening, particularly the strong anti- jewish anti-semetic movement in newspapers, over the radio and about all of the signs you saw all over the place. they were above every store and every public holding building. soon after this we were forced i wouldn't say soon, about a year we were forced out of our apartment and just before that both my brother and i my brother was four years older than i was, my brother and i were kicked out of school so i was just beginning second grade and my brother was just starting fifth grade, actually sixth grade he just finished

fifth grade and so we were both kicked out of public schools because jews were not allowed to go to public schools. my dad was not allowed to practice medicine he had to work in a hospital he was not able to work on his own. our whole life really began to change dramatically. through all of this my parents never complained, never showed any hatred or anger towards anybody. the model motto of the house was keep your chin up and be positive and proud of who you are, keep your chin up. you are a good person so don't worry about anything. when my parents spoke at the dinner table about any political issues or anti- semetic issues and they wanted to say something that was serious or that was happening

that was very dangerous they would speak in french. they were smart enough to know that seven-year-olds and 11- year-olds should not necessarily know everything that is going on. there are things children maybe should not know. it was an interesting period and about two years after the occupation began we were kicked out of the apartment . we had to leave everything behind, all of the carpeting, the piano, all of the furniture had to be left behind. all we could do was take our personal belongings and we were moved to a smaller apartment that belonged to friends of ours and we were there for about eight or my nine months. from

there we were told one day and we are now approaching 1942, this is three years after occupation, we were told to assemble at the nearby railroad station one of the small railroad stations and we were transported to a small town which next slide which had a wall around it. this was an old medieval town and many of these old towns in europe have defensive walls around them. the germans picked this town called terracing. it was a town built maybe 350 years ago with this 15 foot defensive wall. they kicked

everybody out of the town all of the people that lived there maybe 1000 a total excuse me nine or 10,000. they kicked them out of the town and made it into a jewish ghetto. here we suddenly had 20,000 or 30,000 maybe up to 35,000 jewish families living next slide. the boys were separated from the girls and the women were separated from the men so my parents were living separately and my brother and i were put in this boys school. this was a little public school that was converted into dormitories. i was by this time about 10 1/2 years old so i was with the 10 and 11-year-olds and my brother was with the 15-year-olds. he was in a different classroom and these classrooms were converted into dormitories.

we had these bunkbeds. this is an actual picture taken after the war of that school. it mostly housed children. my main interest my main hobby and my passion was art. art and sketching and drawing was something i really enjoyed doing. in the morning we typically had very short lectures on history and maybe a little bit of math and some social studies. it was all very impromptu and casually presented. it was not really school type education. we did not have any books or much paper to write on. we didn't have any lesson plans so it was mostly discussion by people most of whom were now

trained to be instructors and teachers. in the afternoon we had pretty much time to ourselves to do whatever we wanted to do. i would go out and watch some soccer games, i would take a piece of paper and do some sketching and drawing when i was outside. in the evening we had a chance to visit with our parents. my dad worked in a clinic because he was a doctor so he worked in a very primitive very poorly equipped clinic and my mother worked in a kitchen, a huge kitchen almost like an army kitchen that cooked for a few thousand people at a time. food was very scarce, we had mostly soup and maybe bread, there was no such thing as dessert or fruit or fresh vegetables, it was really spartan and simple.

many people were hungry. it was not a good place to be. it was totally limited, we could not leave the town, there were no stores or shops. you couldn't buy anything or get any clothing or fresh food or anything like that. it was very restrictive and very simple. a very simple restrictive type of life. next slide. something really interesting happened about eight or nine months after we arrived. one of the kids in our classroom came in one day and he was actually a twin in my classroom and he came in very upset and said, when i asked him what happened he said, well my grandmother just took an overdose of sleeping pills and she is in a coma and when i was

probing him to find out what really happened, why do you think she did this, why did she take the overdose? he said she apparently was told that she is going to be shipped east and then she did not want to be shipped anywhere because she is quite old in her 70s or early 80s and she knew she would not be able to survive another transport so that is when she decided to commit suicide. it was the first time i realized the two was a temporary transition point. that people are being shipped east and east typically would mean poland. sure enough about three or four

months later in december 1943 our family was asked to assemble at the railroad station and we got on these trains that were designed to carry cattle. these were cattle cars, horses or cattle. they had no seats, no toilets, just a wooden floor, no windows to speak of and we were loaded up on the cattle cars. there about 2500 of us and this is december the second week of december 1943. we were taken by train by these two car trains for two days with nothing but a pail of water and another pail for human waste. we have two pale buckets in the

car, one was for human waste and one was for water and we traveled with no food to and a half days and we ended up on this platform that you see here. this platform we arrived in the middle of december and it was a very cold day. actually what you see here is kind of unthreatening sort of. we arrived around 1130 or 12:00 at night so everything was dark and there were very frightening crisp nights full of shouting in german get out get out. we had to leave our luggage on a big pile right on this platform and then we were transported by trucks into the main camp which

was obviously a huge prison camp. i need to stop them and explain to you what was happening here. this was a stroke of luck, an absolute stroke of luck. we arrived just about at the time when just a few weeks before apparently maybe a couple of months before the germans were told that there is a possibility the international red cross that the jews are being treated well we are alive and there are whole families being kept

together, they set this up, this is why we didn't go into the gas chamber from the platform but directly into the family camp. in the check family camp there was already about 5000 people that arrived in september the previous september, that's when the camp was set up. four months before we got there. >> then there was another 5000 two transports of 2500 which was our transport. so now there was a group of roughly 10,000 people 5000 and 5000 in the czech family camp. and here is what we saw as we approached the actual camp. literally hundreds and hundreds of yards of barbed wire full of elect the city, you couldn't even get close to this wire because it was high-voltage and electrified barbed wire.

so with so with the high intensity floodlights and what this doesn't show is that at each main corner where this barbed wire makes a turn, there is a machine gun post, there is a tower in the 15 or 20 foot tower on each corner with the guard with a machine gun. this is a high security prison and when we arrived about a day or so after we arrived we found out that we were in the house which auschwitz . these are numbers i found out after the war, in auschwitz who were several gas chambers were the nazis were killing people by the thousands in the gas chambers. and there was a total number of people, the estimates are that there was a total number of 1.2

million people people killed in the auschwitz birkenau compound . >> you can see the american air force photo which shows just one part of the auschwitz- birkenau complex. every one of those little lines that you see a little black lines is a bear, this is where people lived so, you have literally hundreds of barracks and it goes on and on and doesn't show the whole camp. and, what's interesting about this photo it's a good orientation for you, is that every two lines of barracks, every two rows of barracks typically was one camp. so imagine there is a barbed wire

between every two of those lines of barracks and that's what our camp looked like. that's what the auschwitz family camp look like . we had perhaps 24 or 26 barracks and they were separated female and male. there was a female section and a male section and upon arrival , we were immediately separated from the women, so my brother, my father and me were in one ferric and then my mother ended up in a female section of the barracks of the camp. on the second day we were taken into the showers, we were shaved and we were given very short haircuts that we were

tattooed, everybody got a number on my left arm and my numbered was 169,000 057 so you can tell by the number, basically, how many people were in the camp. i was number 169057. we were given some very simple uniforms and we went back into the barracks and we will put through terrifically scarce food diet, we were hungry from the get go. we were given, typically two pieces of bread per day and two bowls of soup. there was no meat got very few potatoes and no dessert and very little red and we were starving from the first day on.

it was a diet of maybe 700 or 800 cal per day which was almost impossible to live on. so, everybody was pretty hungry and i think the only thing that saved us was the fact that my brother and i were still relatively young and did not reek wire the amount of food that a grown up would require. the other thing that helped us was that we were not physically very active. we were pretty much hanging around the barrick and we didn't have to go to work so we weren't physically strained in any way. something very interesting happened on the second day. i decided i was gonna go visit my mother and i walked over into the female section of the camp and found her and spent

maybe an hour or an hour and a half talking to her and as i was leaving her barrick, i noticed that there were two little rooms at the end of the barrick and that was typical and there were two little rooms as you exit the barrick and they were typically designed for notetaking having someone there that can take take track of the prisoners and check how many people are sick and how many people have died or how many people have gone forward and now many people are returned and so forth. record-keeping was one of the reasons. as i looked into one of the rooms, there was a glass window in the door and as i looked through the glass window i

noticed a young woman, looks like she had an easel and was painting a picture. this really got my attention and it really caught my eye and i was looking trying to figure out what is this prisoner doing here with an easel and a bunch of watercolors painting a picture. she saw me looking at her through the window and she nudged me with her hand to come in and i went in and introduced myself and she told me that her name was dena and that she was an artist and that she came from the same place we did that she came in the september

transport she came with the double transport of 2500 people will 5000 people. and i found out later that she was an artist and she started art in prague and i also found out that when the ss noticed she was an artist they hired her because they assigned her to paint portraits of some of the gypsies in the next camp . >> you may not be aware of this but gypsies were kind of nomadic group of people will that traveled around europe and they did not fit the [ null ] concepts of people should be,

what they should look like and basically they didn't fit the [ null ] concept of what the right person should look like and they basically wanted to eliminate or kill all the gypsies in europe and they did a good job in the [ null ] . >> this is a picture taken by the russians towards the end of the war when they walked into auschwitz. this is typically what some of the kids looked like >> so here is one of the key doctors in auschwitz that found out, someone told him

that one of the ss officers told him that he found an artist and her name was dena and as soon as the doctor who we were looking at here at one of the key doctors in auschwitz, found out that tina could paint and paint realistic when she wanted to, he assigned her to paint portraits of some of these gypsy women and men that he was going to kill. then, that's what she was doing, painting the pictures and portraits of some of the gypsy women. >> so here is all of the portraits he was painting when i met her. there was a total of 12 or 14 portraits, both men and women and you have to understand that

this was before color photography, this is when mandela wanted her to be very realistic and true in terms of color and detail because he didn't trust the technology or color photography at that time. so, dino was very important at this point and, i visited dena almost every day when i visited my mother i would say hello and she was always painting. then one day, dena, on the fourth or fifth day, dena said to me that she would like to introduce me to her boyfriend his name was willie. willie was a german prisoner who befriended dena or she befriended him and they became good friends. he was very important in the

czech family camp. he was the overseer of the czech family camp. he was german, he was not jewish, this way, the ss could deal directly with him rather than deal with some of the jewish people in the camp. so he was basically the big kid on the block, the big guy on the block and was in charge of all the jewish prisoners in our camp. and, when i met him he asked me, in german, if i was interested in being his message being his sidekick so to speak and running messages to the ss and so forth and taking care of close and cleaning his shoes and this kind of stuff and i said yes and obviously this puts me into a very secure position in the camp, being under the umbrella of willie brockman. i work for willie for several

months and i was able to get better food and better clothing and i could share some of the food with my brother and father and mother. so i was in a good secure position because i was working for willie brockman. well, shortly after we got there , i must tell you, and i didn't mention this at this point, but shortly after we got there, i would say within two weeks, i realized that me, as a child at 12 years old i realized that this was an extermination camp. there were four crematorium with huge chimneys puffing huge amounts of heavy smoke every day all day, 24 hours a day and

i knew that there were people arriving at the platform every day and disappearing. i knew that this was an extermination camp, i could smell the burning of the human bodies. there was ash all around us. if the wind was blowing in the right direction from the crematorium, we were literally covered in ash, and human ash. so, i knew and this is a 12- year-old now, i knew that this was an extermination camp and i knew people were being killed every day and, sure enough i found out the numbers were horrendous that i found out after the war between five and 6000 people killed every day, it was tremendous but just imagine killing 5000 people a day, 50,000 people in 10 days, hundred thousand people in 20 days, it's unbelievable, automation of human murder.

>> so, this went on and on and the whole mood of the camp was threatening and very ugly in every possible way. and what happened after about five or six months after the international red cross visited some of the camps, but they apparently told dss germans that they plan no further inspections of any other camps. this is information we got after the war. so, what happened in april in 1944 is that bss decided to terminate and evacuate or kill everybody in the czech family

camp. the first people killed were the people that came in september, the 5000 people that came in september that they were killed in april 1944. so suddenly, our camp was half empty because the ss killed almost, with the exception of dena and a few other people, almost everybody that came in september. in july 1944, four months later, the ss decided to evacuate, terminate the camp completely and now there's another almost 5000 people left that came in december. we went through a medical inspection in front of dr. mangel and another ss people. and everybody had to go through this, what was called a selection. selection, basically meant that you are either going to live or you were gonna die.

you are going to be picked to be a laborer and go to work or you're going to go to the gas chamber. i thought they were going to go through a medical inspection and maybe may be this sick would end up in a clinic or whenever but i wasn't absolutely sure that this was a life-and-death scenario. so i was standing in line with maybe 200 children and my brother was right next to me and my brother was limping, he had a problem with one of his legs and he was limping and as soon as he saw my brother had a lamp he directed him to the left with a group of kids on the left side of the table outside

in july 1944. we were outdoors. as soon as he saw me, i'm 12 years old at this point he points me to the left as well so now, i'm in a group of children that are eight and nine years old and five years old to 14 years old, whatever six, little small crime standing there not understanding the geometry and suddenly out of nowhere comes willie brockman, the fellow i work for as an assistant or runner and he comes from nowhere and this is maybe 30 or 40 feet from a group of ss people and he comes to me and he grabs me by my left shoulder and shoves

me into a group of older children on my right about 80 boys, 14 and 15 years old. and he shoves me into this group and disappears, it was then that i realized that he just to save my life. and that my brother is in real trouble everybody on the left will probably be killed and everyone on the right is gonna survive. so, all of this was happening very fast and in a very confusing way and i was able to say goodbye to my mother, who by the way decided to stay with my brother, she knew that he was doomed and she did not want him to go into the gas chamber by himself so she decided to go with him to stay with him, which i didn't know, i had no idea, i found this out after the war that she elected to

stay with them because she didn't want to desert him. i said goodbye to my father who i thought was also safe because he was a physician and i knew they needed the position to take care of some of the prisoners. we were now, we, meaning about 85 or 86 boys and myself, we were taken to another camp and my father was transferred into a medical camp which was not too far away. here's a picture of . >> these were ugly dangerous

experiments being done on jewish children and most of these were headed by dr. mengele . >> when my mother realized that she and perhaps a couple thousand other prisoners, including my brother, her son, were going to be killed, she wrote a letter, little note to my father who was already in the medical camp she wrote a very nice passionate note that was without any anger or hatred . she basically said, my dearest, don't blame yourself for what happened, this was our destiny, have a good life and she's giving him all kinds of advice about living well and taking care of me really well

and the whole notice very positive and very unthreatening in any way. she gave this note to one of the guards and on the cover of the note she wrote dr. grunwald, f lager, medical camp. the guard took the note in the next they gave it to my dad my dad had this note until his death in 1967. i got hold of the note later and it in my house for years, and finally, about three years ago i gave it to the national holocaust museum in washington dc. so, if you ever go there it's one of the few artifacts that represent the mental attitude of a prisoner just before they

were killed. so, my mother and my brother were killed the next day either the same day or the next day after she wrote the note on july 11, 1944. to go on with the story is that i stayed in auschwitz january 1945, my father left auschwitz in october, 1944, i saw him leave the camp and was trying to give him some clothing over the fence as he was leaving. he left in a large group of prisoners. through an overcoat over the fence. i through a pair of boots i wanted him to have i through the roots over the electric wire and one of the boots got stuck on top the wire . but anyway, he got the overcoat and he disappeared in

the distance and a group of maybe two or 3000 prisoners. he was shipped to germany, he survived two or three other camps and he was liberated by the american army in may 1945. . >> this is one of the camp commanders about switch. his name is rudolph hess,. he was very truthful in what he confessed, some of the numbers, some of the accurate numbers, gas chamber numbers, the record numbers he quoted were 5000 people were killed every day in the gas chamber that was a record but the number was higher because they were burning people outside so the people they couldn't burn in the

crematorium they had to burn outside. , here you can see and assess photo where the prisoners had to dig huge ditches outside and they would put the corpses in the ditches and they would pour gasoline and burn them the bodies in the ditches. they would burn them outside and this is why numbers are much higher than 5000 per day.

>> these warehouses, filled with clothing, this is all prisoner clothing. these people came from parts of europe they had to undress and go through the showers are in the gas chambers and then they left all the clothing behind that had to be cleaned and transported in most of the clothing ended up in germany and was given to the german population. we had to transport the clothing from warehouse to warehouse . >> it was a great attempt to liquidate and evacuate because

the russian is coming maybe 150 miles away, trying to get all the prisoners out of the house was as possible before the russians came in. so we left auschwitz on a death march the second week of 1945, january, 1945. i almost died on the death march because it was a killer march we walked for 2 1/2 days without food and water to the nearest railroad station. and on the second day i started hallucinating and i couldn't walk anymore i was seeing things that weren't real. i was walking with two dentists, two polish dentists that sort of took me under their wing. i was walking in the snow and all i

saw was a bunch of dead bodies in the ditch. so every time someone couldn't walk anymore the germans would shoot him and throw him in the ditch. i told these two guys, i can't walk anymore, i'm too tired, i'm too weak and they basically forced me to walk. they said no, you've got to walk . they grabbed me by my shoulders and my arms and forced me to walk. we did get on a train i made it through the death march, we traveled for two days in an open train. we ended up at a concentration camp in austria after two days. this was a large camp called mount housing. it was a very serious and very huge, one of the first big austrian camps in austria .

>> polish russian, american prisoners, american army prisoners, it was a huge camp, very dangerous. tremendous amount of disease and hunger. one of the famous quarries, stone quarries was in mauthausen. many prisoners had to work in a quarry and died while working in the quarry , cutting stone. >> here is a picture taken by the americans when they liberated mauthausen in may 1945. you can see what everybody look like. it was a bunch of skeletons walking around, sometimes not even walking. special here's a 14-year-old boy just liberated by the american army in mauthausen.

we were literally skin and bones because of hunger. we had virtually no food at all that we were living on five or 600 cal per day . >> so, mauthausen did not have a large enough gas chamber or crematorium so, in mauthausen they would throw the bodies into a big pit and burn them. >> here is the commandant of mount housing caught after the war and executed by the americans. so, we were moved after a week or two, moved to another camp called melk, i don't even know if it's on the map but, from melk, we left

there after three months and went back to mauthausen on the upper right part of the map. and then, around the first or second of may, 1945, we did another death march all the way from mauthausen to the left where you see the name there, a little town, we walked for two days again to gunskirchen. we ended up in a human dump, literally we were dumped into the woods in gunskirchen and the camp was nothing but a bunch of trees surrounded by barbed wire. there was no running water, no food, no running water, no

toilets, so, we were in the woods and we got, the first day we got a bowl of soup and a piece of bread the second day we got a bowl of soup and a piece of bread. now were looking forward to at least another bowl of soup and a piece of bread on the third day and the third day we get nothing and the fourth day we get nothing. this is now may 3 1945 and we are sleeping out in the woods and there is nothing but dead bodies all around us and we are just trying to survive. no food no water. the third day and the fourth day. the fifth day i wake up outside to machine gun fire. around 5:30 am or 6 am i hear

machine gun fire and small arms fire and i thought right away they must be shooting prisoners, because i had no idea where the american army was at this point. so, i'm thinking they must be shooting the prisoners in about a half an hour later i noticed that there are three or four guards, military guards these are not ss people, these are military guards standing in the huddle holding a white sheet and sort of half awake and half- asleep i'm terribly weak with no water or food for two or three days and i'm looking at guards and holding a white sheet and i'm noticing these people are in trouble and giving up. within two or three minutes i saw the first american g.i. walked into the camp and realize then that for me at

least the war was over. we were taken to the nearest town by truck the americans took us to the town of pershing a little town cut 10 miles from this camp . we were put up in the school there was 20 or 30 kids, young boys that were put up in the school and we had no way of getting home, we were given food and clothing and we took showers and basically we were recovering in this town of pershing. three of the boys decided that they would jump a train and try to go to prague by train. we were not sure they were going to make it but they did, they made it to prague and two of them ended up in a hospital. my father got to prague from

germany about two weeks earlier and he found out that there were two kids in the hospital that just came from austria. so, he drove to the hospital that he interrogated the two boys and they were the two boys and they jumped the chain and they told him where i was in her shiying in a little public school near the pershing airport and he drove to her shiying and that's where i got reunited with my dad. we returned back to prague and we eventually got back to the apartment in prague and my dad practiced medicine for three or four years and i went back to high school, to junior high and basically we tried to restart our lives. after the communists took over the country in 1948 my dad, who remarried by that

time, decided to escape from the communists czechoslovakia and we escape to austria. then, from austria we got papers to immigrate to england and we ended up in england in 1949. and we eventually came to this country in 1951.. here's a picture of the small camp, the human dump that i referred to which was the last camp i was in. this is what the american soldiers saw when they walked in. there were a bunch of bodies, you don't quite know who is alive or who is dead, most of these people are dead. this is after the war, this is dena, the artist that introduced me to willie brockman saved my life.

this was dena taken and her mother after the war taken in france. she eventually immigrated to the united states and worked for disney as an illustrator she passed away about 10 years ago eight or nine years ago in san francisco. this is my brother and i to i'm about five years old and my brother is about nine years old. my mother and i, again i am about five years old in this picture. my father, the dock. this is me after the war about three months after the war. basically that completes my story. i don't know if you have any questions but this is basically the end of my presentation. thank you. [ applause ]

we have about 10 minutes, i think we have some questions. first of all i would like to take the time to thank you for being here today. i'm a senior here at greensburg high school, not only did you lose your mom but you also lost her brother. in the letter it says time heals, i have heard this a lot. with your experience, do you feel this is true? >> could you repeat that? >> not only did you lose your mom you lost your brother and in the letter it says time heals, i've heard this a lot, with your experience, do you feel the statement is true that time heals? >> that it's true?

>> no. well, it's partially true, it's a difficult question. it's partially true. it doesn't heal everything there is an interesting mental scenario that i go through almost every day what i call the flashbacks. where, i will see a mother with two children and i immediately recognize the fact of how lucky these kids are coveys 15 or 16- year-old boys are and girls to

have their mother, who i lost when i was 12. so, there are flashback i see somebody at a soccer game covered by an army blanket because it's a cold day in there watching soccer and i immediately flashback to the one army blanket i had in auschwitz, that i covered myself with . the one army blanket my father had and i was tucking him in because i wanted to make sure that there was no air coming through anywhere because we were so cold in auschwitz. so, i may see somebody eating a black piece of pumpernickel bread, that's the same kind of read we were given in auschwitz or in mauthausen. so, right away it flashes back

to mauthausen or czech or auschwitz. these flashbacks come back every day, sometimes five or 10 times per day. it's very difficult to forget what we went through or what other people went through. it's a great question, by the way. >> i'm a senior here and my question is, how do you feel this letter impacts those who are learning about the holocaust today? >> the letter? >> well, it's relevant but, the letter, the letter doesn't really -- my mother's letter doesn't really direct the attacker claim or is not a

direct reference to the holocaust. i think it's more of a reference to the inner strength that the individuals need to have in order to overcome punishment and abuse and unfairness. it talks to human attitude and strengths more than the holocaust itself. i think it's a good or great part of the letter . >> thank you. >> hello, my name is brady. my question is, what kind of

inspiration did the letter give you? >> well, you know, i almost feel it's very intimidating because i almost feel that i do not have the right to complain about anything. so, putting a very high standard of behavior on me. so, if i feel pain, physical pain or if i'm annoyed at something that i know is not right, i really don't have the right to complain about it because people have gone through such horrendous suffering including death at the age of 39, she was 39 when she went into the gas chamber. so, that's putting a very high standard of savior on me, which

is challenging for me very often because sometimes complaining that sometimes your blowing off steam by complaining about something because you're frustrated because you're gonna complain, that's all you can do really. it's very challenging, it's very challenging for me to abide by those standards that she had. it's tough . >> thank you . >> hello, my question is was it more difficult to survive the holocaust with everything going on or dealing with the loss of your mother and sibling . >> sorry expect i'm good . >> was it more difficult to survive the holocaust or the death of your family members?

>> by far the difficulty came from the death of my family members. by far. because, in terms of survival, i didn't have any choice. i had to go on. so, i tried to go on i was lucky , because in a lot of instances, it was other people that help to me, like willie brockman who shoved me into the group of older kids or, like the two dentists that force me to walk when i couldn't walk anymore. so, in many cases it was other people who were supporting me and helping me but the death of my brother and mother were the toughest. to be a witness of the deaths of the other people, many of whom i knew i knew

several of the people in mauthausen that died right in front of my eyes. i knew some of the people that were lying in the ditch when we walked from auschwitz to the polish railroad station. i recognize some of the polish people i knew that were shot and in the snow in the ditch. so, that was very painful to see the dead peep, also. >> hello, what is the most important thing that your mother taught you? >> respect for other people. no question about it. the immediate thing that comes to my mind is total reverence and respect for other people, regardless of who they are. total respect.

she never differentiated anyone on the basis of their income or profession or color or religion. there was no differentiation whatsoever, she judge them on who they were as people. that stayed with me all these years . >> it's a great question . >> hello, my question is, did you stay in touch with anyone after you left the camp. if so, who are they? >> yes. there were 86 or 88 boys, older boys that i ended up with, i was one of the youngest.

. >> we have a list of everyone who survived, maybe half of them survive so we have a list of maybe 40 or 42. some are still alive, there are a couple , one of them is in canada and one is in boston massachusetts and i'm still in touch with them. >> thank you . >> hello mr. grunwald. i was wondering, what's the most vivid memory you have from the holocaust? >> it's a multiple. it's multiple. it's the suffering of the people.

it's people dying in front of my eyes. people that i knew. people that had a disease spread by eli scott people that that i was bringing water to because they were getting dehydrated. the doctor, a polish doctor who was a good friend of mine, i was bringing him water because he asked me for water and i would bring him a glass of water or a cup of water and then i would come back two hours later to check on him and he was dead to. all of these fragments of memories of people that either suffered or died always come back to me whether it was on a death march or mauthausen or melk. i had some positive memories also, when we had a fighter plane in the concentration camp,

we had american fighter planes coming down on a guard tower and machine gunning the guard in the guard tower. so, there are different types of memories but most are from suffering and observing how other people suffered. >> thank you . >> hello. my question is, what do you consider the biggest obstacle that you had to overcome? >> hmmm. obstacle, that's a tough one. so, one of the big obstacles was going back to junior high. so, after not having second grade, third grade fourth grade

, or fifth grade, basically going from first grade and skipping all of that and then going to junior high, that was tough for me. it was not only tough from an intellectual or scholastics endpoint it was tough because i had trouble concentrating on some of the work because my mind was still back in the camps. it was a double whammy and it was difficult from both ends. it was a big obstacle. then, getting back into my normal rhythm of life after being away for four years was a tough one. >> thank you . >> ladies and gentlemen, how about a great big round of applause for frank grunwald. [ applause ]

thank you. thank you very much. >> >> on friday, c-span's coverage starts with remarks from elizabeth warren speaking with voters and the democratic party. watch her comments live at 7:30 pm eastern on c-span . >> this coming weekend the governors association holds its annual winter meeting starting saturday section with a discussion on criminal justice reef warm beginning live at 10:15 am eastern on c-span. then after remarks from j.p. morgan chase chair, speaking to governors at 11 10 eastern on c- span.

>> there are nearly 100 new members of the u.s. house this year, including congresswoman iona presley who'd defeated micheal capuano in the democratic riemer last year for the boston-based seventh district. she previously served as an at- large member of the city council. this isn't her first experience with congress, she worked for joseph kennedy and john kerry earlier in her career. rural retreat hand is also a former congressional's effort who served as former representative marty meehan's chief of staff. prior to her election, the congresswoman was ceo of the consulting firm. representative chris pappas has been involved in state and local politics since the early 2000 serving three terms on the negative counsel. two terms in

the statehouse also. congressman pappas is also co- owner of puritan backroom, manchester new hampshire restaurant often visited by presidential candidates. he's the first openly gay candidate voted . >> johanna hays first came to national attention when obama named her 2016 national teacher of the year at a white house ceremony. she's only the second african- american to representative resent connecticut in congress. a republican who also represented the congressman in the 90s. new congress, new leaders, watch it all on c-span. >> the house and senate are not in session this week for the president they recess that both chambers return on monday. they plan to spend the week working on gun safety legislation including a measure related to universal background checks and closing loopholes. see this live on c-span

returning monday where nebraska senator deb fisher will take heart in the annual reading of george washington's address. they continuing debate on an abortion bill before beginning work on the nomination of andrew wheeler's to be the next head of the environmental protection agency. follow the senate live on cspan- 2 . >> each week, american artifacts visits museums, archives and historical places. we learn the story of the oldest synagogue in washington d.c. as the 1876 building is lifted and moved 800 feet to be incorporated into a new capital jewish museum. this is half an hour . >> i'm the executive director of the new capital jewish museum , we are standing here on third street are getting ready to move our historic synagogue down the street to the side of the new museum. this building was built in 1876