It took only a few minutes for the students to settle in as Michael Korenblit of Edmond, the son of Holocaust survivors, related the story of his parents to the middle school students.
Korenblit is co-author of "Until We Meet Again," the true story of the love and survival of his parents in the Holocaust. He took the students on a journey through time to Hrubieszow, a town in Poland, during the late 1930s and 1940s, and shared the stories of two families and the impact of the war on their lives.
Korenblit's two characters are Manya and Meyer, his parents, who were about the same age as the students he spoke to when they faced the fury of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime.
He relates how his parents' courage, faith, and love for each other sustained them though World War II and the loss of parents and siblings, the constant fear and harsh conditions of hiding, separation from each other for two years, and numerous concentration, and death camps.
Korenblit told the students, "I'm going to tell you a story that took place 65 years ago...and why the story is as important to you today as it was 65 years ago."
And he launched into the tale of his parents' sacrifices, their suffering, and the horror they witnessed during the Holocaust.
He told of how his parents, Manya and Meyer, and their families were herded into ghettos, and how his teenage father would slip out of his ghetto at night to slip into the ghetto where his mother and her family were held.
He told of how the two families struggled to survive in those ghettos, and had to work from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for the Nazis, some building roads for the invasion of Russia.
He told of how the Jewish women were herded into the town to empty and pack the household goods of the Jews who had been forced to abandon their homes, and how his mother was forced to gather and pack her own families' belongings so they could be shipped to Germany.
Some students' could be heard to gasp when he related, "My father saw this with his own eyes. He saw two SS soldiers rip a baby from its mother's arms, throw the baby into the air and begin shooting it to see how many times they could hit it before it hit the ground.
"My mother saw this with her own eyes. An SS officer took another baby from its mother's arms and used it as a baseball bat against a building."
Sometimes Korenblit's voice seemed to crack as he spoke of his parents' deportation to the Nazis' work and extermination camps. In detail he told how three Polish friends tried to help their families, and all three died during the war. "The three people who are responsible for me standing here did not survive the war," he said.
No other sound was heard in the auditorium when Korenblit held up a five-pound bag of flour, and explained how other Poles would turn a hiding Jew into the Nazis for the reward - the few cents half that bag of flour would have cost in the 1940s.
He told of how Manya and Meyer survived their confinement in 13 camps, one of which was the infamous Auschwitz. He told of how his father Meyer would again sneak from his own barracks in the men's camp into the women's camp to visit his beloved Manya.
He told of how Manya was forced to kneel in the snow for 24 hours after her captors found notes she'd written about her camp ordeals in her bunk. He also told of how another woman hid her in outhouse excrement so she could recover from that ordeal.
He told of how his parents were finally separated when they were sent to separate camps, and how they were reunited after the war.
Manya, he related, was liberated by the Russians in 1945. Korenblit asked a female student to stand. "How tall are you? How much do you weigh?" he asked.
Korenblit compared his mother's condition to the young girl's. "My mother was 21 years old. She was five feet, one inch tall, and she weighed 65 pounds when she was liberated."
He told how his father and four friends escaped from the Nazis who had taken them on a death march ahead of the advancing American forces.
They hid in a barn, and were fed by the farmer. "The next day they heard a rumble. They looked outside. Coming down the road were jeeps and trucks flying the American flag," he related.
Korenblit asked a young man his height and weight. When Meyer was liberated, he said, "My dad was 21 years old, five feet, 10 inches tall, and he weighed 78 pounds."
The couple found each other when they returned to their home town in Poland.
In 1950, with one son, Korenblit's older brother, the couple came to the United States, after Manya went to the U.S. authorities, and, because she couldn't speak English, answered "Yes," to all their questions. The couple were relocated in Ponca City, because Manya had answered "Yes" to the question, "Would you be willing to live in a small town in middle America?"
The couple was a little surprised when they found themselves in the middle of Oklahoma, where Korenblit was born.
The child of Holocaust survivors said, "Their survival was one miracle; meeting again was a second. Then there was a third."
In the 1980s, Korenblit helped his mother and father search for any family members who survived the holocaust. The search ranged from Israel to Poland, and ended in England.
Korenblit said his father found that of his approximate 60 family members, including mother, father, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, only one brother survived.
His mother believed that of about 50 members of her family, only she survived. She was wrong. Distant cousins, now living in Israel, revealed that her younger brother, Chaim, was still living in England.
"On Jan. 30, 1982, they were reunited." Manya thought she had lost her brother nearly 40 years before to the gas chambers and the crematoriums.
"I want you always to remember what I have shown you today," Kornblit said.
He reviewed the issues of today, including deaths in Bosnia, Kosovo, Nigeria, school shootings such as at Columbine High School in Colorado, the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, and the destruction of the World Trade Center - all because, as Korenblit reported a young Hitler Youth member confessed as an adult, "We simply didn't care enough for the people."
Korenblit also warned against bullying.
"Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can kill you," he warned the students. "It can start so simply," he said, adding, "But in the Holocaust, minor harassment, in the end, turned to genocide."
He urged to the students to remind their parents and family members to vote, take part in Democracy, and "make sure the laws are for you, not against you."
Korenblit concluded by urging the students to make sure that, "...inside each one of you are people willing to stand up and make this a better world."
