By EmmaLee Italia | Correspondent

“You are the last generation that will see a live Holocaust survivor.”

These words hit home as sixth through eighth grade students of St. Paul School, Princeton, listened to the testimony of Daniel Goldsmith – a Jewish child during World War II, who was protected from the Nazis with the help of Catholic sisters and priests over the course of four years.

The students gathered April 15 to listen to Goldsmith and WWII veteran, PFC Bernard Lens, an American soldier who helped liberate the Nazi death camp Dachau, describe their harrowing firsthand experience. Offered by the Fegelson-Young-Feinberg Post 697 Jewish War Veterans of the U.S.A., the 19-year-running program has been presented to more than 5,500 people in the last year in the southeast Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey areas. 

The presentation was part of St. Paul’s Holocaust Studies unit, a joint program in social studies, religion and language arts classes. Sixth grade teacher Sally Chrisman has been teaching about the Holocaust for about seven years.

“Every year we add new components to include other subjects in some way,” Chrisman said. “Today’s assembly was the first time all three upper school grades participated in a Holocaust program together.”

Chrisman had wanted to bring the program to SPS after hearing Allan Silverberg, Holocaust Remembrance Education Program committee chairman, present a workshop. Silverberg opened the presentation in St. Paul, leading the American flag salute while JWV Post 697 commander Jonathan Sherman played Taps on the trumpet.  Video crew from 6ABC Action News Philadelphia were also present to capture footage of the presentation.

With slides of family photos and WWII documents and pictures, Goldsmith gave a detailed account of his life from 1941 to 1945 – a frightening journey beginning in his home town of Antwerp, Belgium, with anti-Jewish decrees gradually restricting freedoms, and the eventual departure of his father to a forced labor camp. His father entreated him to look after his mother and sister until his return.

“Really, that was the day I lost my childhood,” Goldsmith said. “And I was only 10 years old.”

Goldsmith hid on the roof of his home with his mother and infant sister – who miraculously slept quietly for two hours while Nazis searched the building and dragged people out in their nightclothes to a waiting truck.

His mother sought refuge for her children first at a convent, where the nuns cared for them in secret until 1942, when warnings of a German raid forced her to find her children another hiding place. Goldsmith ended up at a boy’s orphanage run by a benevolent priest, who helped mask the boy’s identity with a new name and false baptismal papers. A subsequent transfer to another orphanage in French Belgium found Goldsmith posing as an altar boy, his true identity concealed by another sympathetic priest.

Following a raid in 1944, Goldsmith escaped captivity from a moving freight train with several other orphan boys, and yet another priest in a nearby village helped to place them with separate Catholic families. Goldsmith lived silently for several months in an attic room with his foster family,

who accompanied him in the backyard during the night – the only safe time for him to go outside – and even gave him a pet rabbit to keep him company.

Finally reunited with his mother after the Americans liberated Belgium in the fall of 1944, Goldsmith later learned of his father’s death in Auschwitz. His sister, who had been sheltered by a Catholic host family for three years, was reunited with Goldsmith and his mother after the war ended.

Lens, 94, served in the U.S. Army under General George Patton. Assisted by Silverberg, he described the atrocities committed by the Nazis upon the Jewish people, accompanied by a slideshow with telling photographs of the victims. Serving in the liberating force that emptied the Dachau camp, he took photographs that he has kept in a jacket pocket for 70 years, which he later showed to the students. One of his duties during the liberation was to help the prisoners out of the barracks, including those unable to walk.

“Two of them couldn’t move, so my captain said to carry them,” Lens recalled. “They died in my arms. Nothing affected me like that. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t have it in my mind.”

Closing the program, the presenters gave St. Paul School a certificate of completion, which Chrisman said they would cherish for years to come. Student council representatives presented Lens, Goldsmith, Sherman and Silverberg with gift bags containing small tokens of gratitude.

Chrisman said that the students’ response to the program so far has been extremely favorable.

“We will be talking and writing about our visitors for some time,” she said.

Eighth grader Gabriela Cano, SPS student council president, said that the presentation made her appreciate all that she has, especially her family.

“Reading about history in textbooks is nothing compared to hearing someone discuss experiences they lived through and seeing the emotion on their face,” Cano said. “The personal stories they told and pictures they shared will stick with me ... I’m so grateful that I was given the opportunity to see this presentation and meet these incredible men. It was very eye-opening.”