About 600 Burnaby high school students met a living piece of history Monday as they listened to one man's tale of surviving the Holocaust.

It was part of Burnaby school district's first Symposium on the Holocaust presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre at Michael J. Fox Theatre. In attendance were Grade 11 and 12 social studies and history students.

North Shore resident Peter Parker was about the same age as most of his audience when he was first sent to Auschwitz by the Nazis in 1943.

He broke the ice with humour referring to his namesake superhero alter ego saying, "Just to clear things out, I'm not Spiderman. If I was I wouldn't jumped over the fence."

But then followed his horrific story, punctuated by gasps from the young audience. It started in 1938 when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. Living in Vienna, Parker was 11 years old when it happened. Literally overnight, his world was turned upside down. At school the next day, the six Jewish kids in his class were told to sit in the back of the room and were told they were no longer allowed to participate in any school activities or use any public facilities.

He soon moved with his single mother and older sister to Czechoslovakia to live with relatives, only to see Germany occupy that country as well. While his mother managed to find work in England to escape Europe, after months of delays–only seven days before Parker and his sister were to join her–the U.K. declared war on Germany and they were stuck in Belgium, where they had gone to live with their grandmother.

Their grandmother died suddenly in an accident and the siblings were on their own with no money or place to live. But they survived.

One day when he stopped to tie his shoe, SS officers picked him up.

He was soon taken to a camp in Belgium and told he'd be transferred to a work camp in Eastern Europe. That turned out to be Auschwitz in Poland. The 4,000 prisoners made the three-day trip by train in 41 cattle cars packed with 90 people each with nothing but a gasoline can for a toilet.

Near their destination, 300 men and teenaged boys were taken aside and marched the remaining distance. "Are my family here yet?" asked one man to an inmate as they arrived. He responded by pointing at the black smoke emanating from chimneys.

"The 3,700 [remaining] people in the transport were gassed and cremated within two hours," Parker told the audience.

For almost two years, Parker managed to survive, largely by doing his best not to draw attention to himself. He was transferred to the Warsaw ghetto where prisoners were dismantling abandoned four-story buildings brick by brick which were used in the war effort. Many fell to their deaths.

Parker befriended the camp cook, who was also from Vienna, and got a job peeling potatoes.

He also survived typhus and later, a death march in 40 degree heat without any water. He used a spoon he'd smuggled out to dig in the dirt until he hit mud, which he drank for the moisture.

He was aboard a train of cattle cars again, headed to Dachau, when Allied planes bombed cars that sported aircraft guns, a ruse he realized was used so the Nazis wouldn't have to kill the prisoners themselves.

The next day, guards started acting strangely, one even asking Parker to trade uniforms with him, which he refused. Before long, three American tanks showed up. A soldier emerged from a jeep and said, "We're the 6th Army. You are free now."

When he was freed at age 16, he weighed only 36 kilograms. After two weeks of weaning the survivors to normal food again, Parker returned to Brussels where he tracked down his sister, who was working for a British army canteen. Within two weeks of that, the siblings were reunited with their mother in England.

"It was pin-drop silence when he was speaking," said Sabha Ghani, head of the social studies department at Burnaby South secondary, and one of the event's organizers.

"It makes it real for the kids," she said of the survivor's story, particularly when the number (six million) of Jews killed in the Holocaust is so huge and horrific it's hard to comprehend.

"As our survivors age and pass on, this is the last generation to hear from eyewitnesses." It's that generation's responsibility to ensure the Holocaust is never forgotten or repeated, she said.

wchow@burnabynewsleader.com