Holocaust survivor shares personal history with students
By Kate Daly Contributing Writer

WHS Student Council President Caitlyn DeFiore and Edgar Krasa, who spoke to the Class of 2008 about his experiences as a concentration camp survivor. PHOTO/KATE DALY

Westborough - When Edgar Krasa was not much older than the seniors at Westborough High School (WHS), he went to Terezin, a Jewish ghetto created in a walled city in Czechoslovakia in 1941.

Eventually a concentration camp, Terezin required alterations before it could house the thousands of Jews eventually sent there, and Krasa was one of the first to arrive. A cook, he used his skills to help plan and establish kitchens. Those skills helped him survive both Terezin and Auschwitz.

"Jewish parents of teenagers urged their children to learn a trade," as relations between Jews and the Germans in Czechoslovakia deteriorated, Krasa said. "Someone said [to my parents] , 'Why don't you have him be a cook so he never goes hungry?' It was good advice."

As Krasa described the increasingly difficult changes in his life with humor, some of the students sat leaning forward in their seats. It is just that kind of living history that led the Bloch family of Westborough to sponsor Krasa's several visits to Westborough schools over the last three years.

"We just think it's an important message, the acceptance of diversity," Sandra Bloch said. "Our opportunity to hear from survivors is dwindling."

It's a message that struck Caitlyn DeFiore when she heard Krasa speak last year. President of the WHS Student Council, DeFiore wanted her classmates to hear him, too. Until this

year, he had spoken to sixthand

eighth-grade classes at Mill Pond Intermediate and Gibbons Middle schools.

"I thought this message and his story was so powerful, I wanted my classmates to hear it before they embark on their next big adventure," DeFiore said.

Krasa, too, understands the importance of his role as personal historian.

"I like to do this as often as possible," he said, "because someday there won't be anyone to tell the story."

In her introduction, DeFiore told her classmates that many Holocaust survivors are unable to talk about their experiences.

"As you listen, I would like you simply to think about a world in which there is no freedom - a world in which your basic human rights are taken away," she said. "And know that wherever prejudice, discrimination and racism are tolerated, evil like the Holocaust can happen again."

Despite the solemn message, Krasa several times had students laughing as he gave a detailed history of Czechoslovakia in the 1930s and 1940s as Germany gained influence and finally control over the country.

School and education were forbidden to the prisoners at Terezin, but that didn't stop them. Teachers without books and students without paper would work through rote memorization, accomplishing a great deal in an atmosphere of fear and hunger, he said.

Most children, though, did not survive the war.

"Out of 15,000 children under the age of 15 that came to Terezin, at the end of the war, only 150 [were] left. Out of this whole group," Krasa said, waving to encompass the students in the auditorium, "only three kids would be alive."

Krasa described horrible conditions, pain, hunger and a death march during which he was shot. That was his salvation; he lay still in a ditch until dark, then escaped into the woods, where he found other escapees and an abandoned camp, with food, and eventually, salvation in the form of Russian troops.

"In six weeks, with my own cooking, I gained 79 pounds," he said.