PS 246’s sixth graders sat in the school’s library, listening attentively as Clara Feldman spoke of the heartbreak and injustice she endured during the Holocaust.

Feldman’s visit to PS 246 was the culmination of the sixth graders’ tolerance and empathy unit, during which the students read “The Diary of a Young Girl” by Anne Frank, and “Night” by Elie Wiesel. They also watched the documentary “Paper Clips” about a middle school that collected 11 million paper clips, one for each person killed in the Holocaust.

One student, Abu Mohammed, 13, says he liked reading Anne Frank’s diary, which she wrote as an adolescent, because it helped put the Holocaust into perspective for him.

Many of the students in teacher Melissa Murphy’s class had never heard of the Holocaust prior to reading these books. However, Murphy says her students became “really interested” in the subject, and eventually one of them suggested writing letters to a Holocaust survivor asking her to come visit.

Feldman, whose visit was arranged by the New York Tolerance Center, spoke to the students about her own experiences, as well as the broader themes of hate and discrimination. “Hate is like a cancer,” Feldman said, “a cancer that cannot be cured.”

Feldman told students of the day that she considers the end of her childhood. She recalled her first-grade teacher hitting her with a ruler over and over again to show the class “how much pain a ‘Jew pig’ can endure.” Feldman said she would never forget how the children in her class, many of whom she had been friends with, laughed as the teacher hit her.

After Hitler’s rise to power, Feldman’s family fled Germany and eventually settled in Italy. Although Feldman lived a “normal life” in Italy for three years, in 1938, after Mussolini allied with Hitler, her life was torn apart. Feldman says she was “condemned to death for the crime of being born” Jewish.

She recalled being loaded onto a truck and told by a soldier, “You don’t have a name here, your number is 7964.”

Feldman was interned at a concentration camp, but managed to escape when the guards were in disarray during an Allied air attack.

During the question and answer session after Feldman’s presentation, a student asked what Feldman was thinking as she fled her concentration camp. Feldman replied, “I wish I could say I was thinking, but really I was just surviving.”    —Graham Kates