Stimson Middle School was honored to welcome back Holocaust survivor Marion Blumenthal Lazan. For more than twenty years, Mrs. Lazan has visited our halls to share her profound and inspiring story with our eighth-grade students. Now 91 years old, she continues her determined mission of traveling across the tri-state area to bear witness to the six and a half years she and her family spent under the Nazi German regime.

 

“These are my childhood experiences during World War II in the concentration camps,” Mrs. Lazan began. “I will tell you about our liberation and how we finally started our lives anew in our blessed United States of America. Mine is a story that Anne Frank might have told had she survived. And as most of you know–I think all of you know–Anne Frank was a young Jewish girl who died along with most of her family in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. This is also a story that conveys a message of perseverance, determination, faith, and above all, hope.”

 

Stimson Principal Michael Duggan emphasized the importance of Mrs. Lazan’s visits so that students can make an important connection to history from someplace other than a textbook. "It's a powerful story. You hear about the atrocities and the challenges, but it ends with such a story of hope and doing what's right in the world. For our next generation coming up, they need to hear that. Yes, it's hard right now, but it's important to just keep working and trying to overcome any obstacles," said Mr. Duggan.

 

Mrs. Lazan shared with students the harrowing conditions her family endured in prison and refugee camps, specifically Westerbork in Holland and Bergen-Belsen in Germany. She spoke of the daily struggle living in overcrowded, dirty barracks infested with disease and lice. Food was scarce, often consisting of nothing more than thin soup and a single piece of bread.

 

Water was also scarce, for both drinking and hygiene purposes. “Toilets were long wooden benches with holes cut into them, one next to the other. There was no privacy. There was no toilet paper. There was no soap and hardly ever any water with which to wash. And in the almost year and a half that we were in Bergen-Belsen, never once were we able to brush our teeth,” said Mrs. Lazan. 

 

She witnessed people dying either from disease or at the hands of the Nazis. She lived in fear every day that either she or someone in her family would be the next one to die or be killed.  As a way of keeping her mind active, and feeling some control over keeping her family safe, the young Marion convinced herself that if she could always find four perfect pebbles, identical in color and shape, while imprisoned in Bergen-Belsen, her family would survive together. “Four Perfect Pebbles” is the name of the book Mrs. Lazan wrote about her family’s ordeal.

 

The Blumenthal family was saved when the concentration camps were liberated in 1945 by the Allied forces fighting the Nazis and they were able to make it to America. Only weeks after liberation, her father sadly died from typhus, a disease that killed many. Despite the unimaginable hardships she faced, Mrs. Lazan’s message remains one of resilience and kindness. She encourages students to look beyond their differences and treat one another with respect and empathy, ensuring that the lessons of the past are never forgotten.

 

“Each and every one of us must do everything in our power to prevent such hatred, such destruction, and such terror from reoccurring,” she told the students. “And it can begin by having love, respect, and compassion towards one another, regardless of religious belief, regardless of the color of our skin, regardless of national origin. This respect towards one another must begin in our homes, around the kitchen table, the dining room table, wherever we gather as a family. We, the adults, must pass it on at our places of business. You, the students, in your classrooms, in the halls of your school, communities, towns, cities, and only if there's respect and compassion towards one another in the countries can we expect to have peace in the world.” 

 

Mrs. Lazan’s emotional visit to our eighth graders always wraps up with a long line of students waiting to hug her as she comes off the stage. One of those students was Benjamin Meijer, who said it was “incredible” to hear the stories they’ve read about in textbooks from a first-person perspective. “I learned about the true hardships. We’ve read about it in class, but seeing her speak with so much emotion. You could tell how much she cared and wanted to touch our hearts,” said Benjamin.

 

We are incredibly grateful to Marion Blumenthal Lazan for her continued dedication to our students and for sharing her light with the Stimson community.

To learn more about Mrs. Lazan, visit her website FourPerfectPebbles.

 

Mrs. Marion Lazan is author of ‘Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story, a memoir.’ Mrs. Lazan joined us in presenting to our eighth-grade students her moving first-hand account of her family’s experience from imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps to liberation. 

 

 

Mrs. Lazan held up the patch that she and millions of other jews were forced to wear to identify them in the concentration camps and in transit. 

 

 

Throughout her presentation, Marion Lazan keeps an image of her mother who lived to be 105 years old. She credits her mother’s strength and fortitude for getting her family through their horrific experiences in the concentration camp. 

 

 

 

After her presentation, Mrs. Lazan came down to the audience to speak with students and staff to give her much-loved hugs.