Saved when the ‘gas system’ failed

Holocaust survivor tells tale of hardship to students

SARATOGA SPRINGS — Following their tradition of learning through experience, not text books, Saratoga Independent School students listened to a German Holocaust survivor tell her story Tuesday.

In two separate age-appropriate discussions, Edith Pagelson, who now lives in Westchester, and whose grandson Jacob Lucas attends SIS, talked about her experiences growing up in Germany, as well as being persecuted in the Holocaust during World War II as part of the school’s teachings of the German culture and history.

Pagelson was only 15 years old when she and her mother were taken captive by the Nazis from a home in Worms, a city on the Rhine in southwestern Germany, and sent into a concentration camp in Czestochowa, Czechoslovakia. She was later transferred to other camps, including Auschwitz where she narrowly escaped death in the “showers” when the gas systems failed. She was finally liberated at age 20.

Source:

MELISSA DOWNER, The Saratogian
03/01/2007
www.saratogian.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17913877&BRD=1169&PAG=461&dept_id=602469&rfi=6


Webmaster note: According to the “experts,” the Zyklon-B gas was thrown into the Nazi gas chambers either through windows (!) or through non-existent hollow columns in the gas chamber. There was no “system” to break down. Oops!