CRANBERRY TWP — It's been more than 70 years since the tragedy that was the Holocaust, but the memories are still fresh in survivors' minds.

Judah Samet, one such survivor, shared his story Monday with students and staff members at Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic High School.

“Love thy mother and father,” said Samet, who called his mother the “heart and soul” of his family while they were in a concentration camp. “She was 4 feet, 10 inches, but she stood 10 feet tall.”

[naviga:h3]Young life[/naviga:h3]

Samet was born Feb. 5, 1938, to an Orthodox Jewish family in Debrecen, Hungary. His parents operated two knitting factories.

“We were prosperous and had a good life,” Samet said.

Also in the family were two brothers, Moshe and Yakove and a sister, Henyah.

In 1941, Hungary, led by the anti-Semitic Arrow Cross Party, allied itself with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany,

With Nazi laws enacted, Jews were soon discriminated against.

Samet's father received a passport and tickets to America to get away from the radical changes Hungary was facing. But the Samets would not get the chance to leave.

[naviga:h3]Concentration camp[/naviga:h3]

Samet's life, along with the rest of his family's, was changed forever when German soldiers ordered them out of their home.

The family was told to leave everything behind except for their valuables and changes of underwear.

They were then forced to march “several hours” to a train station. People walking too slow were hit with a club, and those who stopped completely were shot to death, Samet said.

The train cars were intended for carrying livestock.

Two buckets were provided for the ride, one for water and the other to serve as a toilet.

Samet's mother was an interpreter for the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. One day, she asked a German sergeant if more could be given for the train ride to camp, breaking a law created by Hitler that Jews could not speak to Germans. A German sergeant held a gun to her head for addressing him.

However, the German commandant ordered the sergeant to put down his gun, stating the importance of having an interpreter.

An oil drum of water was provided for the prisoners.

“God knows how many hundreds survived because of that,” Samet said.

The prisoners were originally slated to go to Auschwitz, one of the most notorious of the concentration camps. However, bombings by the Allies damaged the railways leading there.

The train was redirected to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany.

Rations given to inmates included soup, which Samet described as “mostly water” and bread the “size of a grapefruit” expected to feed a family of six.

“My mother learned how to break it (bread) down to the size of an olive and gave us a teaspoon full of soup and a piece of bread,” he said.

Samet and another child inmate followed German officers to the mess hall and ate scraps from the floor.

“The problem with starvation is when you are starved, nothing else bothers you,” he said.

To add to the abuse of starvation, the young Samet had an abscess on the back of his head. An inmate who was a physician offered to help using tools he had in his satchel.

However, he did not have any medicine to dull the pain.

“He (physician) couldn't believe I was still alive,” Samet said.

Samet has a scar where the surgery was performed.

[naviga:h3]Liberation[/naviga:h3]

In April 1945, two months after Samet's seventh birthday, World War II was coming to an end in Europe.

More than 2,700 camp inmates, including the Samet family, were to be transferred from Bergen-Belsen. They were told they were going to be relocated to another camp.

The train carrying the inmates, however, stopped in a forest.

“We were so weak by then. We thought this would be our final destination,” Samet said.

Out of the trees came a tank with markings dissimilar to the Nazis.

“We could all see that his (soldier's) uniform was different from the Nazis. My father yelled 'Americans.'”

The inmates were rescued from certain death. They were told the train was going to be driven off a wrecked bridge with the train cars' doors locked so no one could escape, according to Samet.

“They (Nazis) knew they were going to stand trial,” Samet said. “They tried to kill all the witnesses.”

[naviga:h3]Post-war[/naviga:h3]

Samet's father died from typhoid fever, a common sickness among inmates, shortly after gaining his freedom.

His family was placed in an Israeli orphanage.

Samet attended school and upon graduating, he served in the military and later became a government employee.

“All the rage was gone,” he said.

He also lived in Toronto, and New York before settling in Pittsburgh as a teacher and marrying his wife, Barbara. The two had one daughter and two grandsons before Barbara died.

Samet, along with his surviving siblings, were interviewed by Steven Spielberg for the movie, “Schindler's List, ” he said.