Holocaust survivor tells his story

COSTA MESA — One day in the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, Anatol Chari found himself staring down the barrel of a rifle. He and a group of other prisoners had stolen food and concealed it on their persons, and the Nazi guard in charge of the soup line noticed that Chari was hiding a jar of marmalade.

The guard set his finger on the trigger, but Chari managed to successfully plead for his life. The future Laguna Beach periodontist escaped unharmed — and kept his marmalade in the process. When Chari spoke to a group of alternative high school students on Wednesday morning, he told them that a good day in a Nazi camp often amounted to a day with nourishment.

“The whole life in camps turned around food,” he said. “The future depended on what kind of soup we had tonight. No one cared about tomorrow.”

Students at the Orange County Department of Education’s alternative high school on Harbor Boulevard have been reading about the Holocaust for several weeks. Administrators were aware that survivors of the genocide are growing fewer and fewer, so when teacher Lisa Locke had a chance meeting with Chari, she invited him to speak to her class.

“Each generation is becoming more and more distant,” said Assistant Principal Jerry Higdon. “When students asked, ‘How does the Holocaust affect us?’ we wanted to show them a living example.”

The two dozen students wrote questions for Chari before his visit, and he answered each one during the course of his hour-long speech. A Polish Jew, Chari survived three concentration camps — Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen and Bergen-Belsen — before Germany’s defeat in 1945.

The Holocaust, he reminded the students, victimized not only Jews but also political dissidents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other groups that the Nazis deemed undesirable. During his presentation, Chari showed pictures on the overhead of daily life in the camps and of the mass graves in which, on a number of occasions, he was assigned to throw corpses.

At one point, when a student asked how he survived the camps, Chari replied, “I don’t know. But if you gave up, you were dead.”

A number of students said afterward that seeing Chari in person made the Holocaust seem much more real.

“I was already scared in my seat, just listening to his stories,” said sophomore Darren Dockery, 17.

But, he added, “It made me have more hope in life.”