Correspondent photo / Sean Barron .... Helen Marks, who survived the Holocaust, holds a photograph of herself as a child, lower right, and two members of an adopted family who took her in as she hid from the Nazis. Marks shared her story with area students who attended her lecture Wednesday at Stambaugh Auditorium. in Youngstown.

By SEAN BARRON

Correspondent

YOUNGSTOWN — Even though Helen Marks has been alive more than eight decades, she remains in the unenviable position of still searching for something idyllic of which she had been deprived.

“I’m still working on a happy childhood,” Marks, 84, of Beachwood, said.

That’s because she spent her first few years experiencing anything but a happy childhood: At age 2, Marks was separated from her parents while trying to hide from the Nazis who were rounding up many Jews during World War II, then sending them to concentration camps. Many died from starvation and torture.

Marks, a retired social studies teacher, shared some of her harrowing and triumphant moments during her one-hour lecture Wednesday morning at Stambaugh Auditorium.≠≠≠Sponsoring the gathering was the Jewish Relations Council of the Youngstown Area Jewish Federation.

Between 1,100 and 1,200 students in grades seven to 12 and their teachers representing 13 middle schools and high schools in Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties attended the event.

Marks’ parents came from large families. Her father, who was a tailor and made fur coats, was one of eight children and her mother was one of 10, said Marks, who also mentioned the infamous two-day “Night of the Broken Glass” event Nov. 9 and 10, 1938. During the state-sponsored anti-Semitic violence, also known as “Kristallnacht,” Nazi paramilitary forces and Hitler Youth members attacked Jewish communities, set fire to hundreds of synagogues and vandalized many Jewish businesses and cemeteries. More than 90 Jews were killed.

At one time, Jews were welcome in Germany, which Marks described as having Europe’s best educated and elite people. After World War I, however, many Germans were destitute, which provided the breeding ground for Hitler, who rose to power in 1933, to scapegoat the Jews and blame them for the country’s hardships.

What began as verbally demonizing Jews morphed into attacking them in other ways, Marks said, adding that some of them were sent to re-education camps, which in reality were forced-labor camps. Over time, Hitler wanted to create a master race before meeting with 15 top Nazi leaders with plans to eradicate Jewish people, also known as the “final solution.”

When many Jews were forced to register their names in 1940 to allow the Nazis to keep track of them, her parents were among those who had numbers assigned to them, which she read aloud to her young audience Wednesday.

In August 1942, the family was on the run from the Nazis, but her father and others were taken via railroad cars to concentration camps, including Buchenwald and Auschwitz, Marks said, adding that her father lost more than 30 pounds while imprisoned, and that he was forced to dig for coal.

One day, her father broke his arm, but since a nearby hospital was ill-equipped to treat him, he used a tin can and a piece of wire to wrap his arm before returning to work, Marks said.

As was custom, prisoners at Auschwitz were tattooed with inmate numbers on their left arms, and her father was the 70,804th prisoner, she added.

When he was no longer able to take the torture and abuse, Marks’ father devised a plan to commit suicide by draping a blanket over his head and intentionally walking into an electrical fence that surrounded the camp. Nevertheless, “he had a vision of me” as an adult standing under a wedding canopy, then aborted the plan to end his life, Marks said.

During her talk, Marks showed the blanket to her audience, but added that no one is certain how her father got it.

Before his death in November 1963 from a heart attack — likely brought on in part by stress associated with having been in the concentration camps — her father was able to walk her down the aisle to see his daughter get married in 1962, Marks continued.

Also during her childhood, Marks and her mother were taken to a camp for three days with no food or water, and on the third day, they went before a Nazi commander who was to decide their fate. Her mother went in with an angry, defiant demeanor and attitude while speaking Hungarian, then lied about her background, prompting the commander to release them before they returned to Antwerp, Belgium, Marks remembered.

“My mother did dumpster diving before it became a term used today,” Marks said, adding that beforehand, her mother had tried to cajole people into offering her food and a place to hide from the Nazis.

After being separated from her mother, a loving Catholic family, Gaston Delfosse; his wife, Gabrielle Delfosse; and their daughter, Gilberte Delfosse, adopted the young Helen after the daughter convinced her parents to do so, she said.

The first challenge was overcoming a language barrier, Marks said, adding that she had not been given an explanation for the separation with her mother until she learned later that it was for the child’s protection.

Even ensconced in the loving home didn’t mean danger was behind her, however. At one point, the family had to hide in a small, 55-degree basement as Nazi tanks came down the area’s only paved street. Their fear escalated when they heard an ominous knock on the basement door before the soldier was called away by his commander, she said.

“We were so quiet; we were afraid to breathe because we heard one of the Nazis jump out of the tank and head to the cellar,” Marks added.

On another frightening occasion, Marks hid in another basement for about three days during which time Gaston Delfosse taught her to read. On several occasions, Marks’ mother came to see her, but she was initially indifferent because the young child didn’t understand why her mother had left.

On one occasion to see her daughter, Marks’ mother crossed a battlefield during the Battle of the Bulge as three soldiers captured but released her after deciding they didn’t wish to shoot her.

The surprise and intense Battle of the Bulge took place In December 1944, after 30 German divisions, with an estimated 250,000 troops, invaded an 85-mile Allied front from southern Belgium to central Luxembourg. The invasion was intended to drive a wedge between the American and British alliance and allow Hitler, who had planned the attack, to negotiate a peace accord.

By late December 1944, the Germans had opened a 50-mile bulge into Allied lines. An estimated 80,000 soldiers were killed, injured or captured.

In October 1947, Marks and her parents reached the U.S. after an 11-day journey across the Atlantic Ocean. They spent time in New York City, New Jersey, Cleveland and Los Angeles before returning to the Cleveland area.

Her father eventually became a carpenter, and she attended Oberlin College in Oberlin, Marks said, adding that during her middle school, high school and college years, she never spoke about having survived the Holocaust “because I didn’t want anything to do with it.”

Marks told her rapt audience that she feels depressed about today’s political climate in the U.S., as well as about the wars in Israel and Ukraine. Nevertheless, she advised the young audience to know themselves, work to be part of the solution to challenges, not the problem and to do their parts to repair the world.

“If everyone exhibits kindness and goodness to others, maybe the world would be repaired,” she said.

Marks’ account is invaluable also because she represents the last generation of survivors who can tell their stories and share insights about having lived through one of the world’s darkest times, Michelle Best, an Austintown Fitch Middle School eighth-grade English language arts teacher, said.

“I believe very strongly that it’s you who tells your story,” she added.

In addition, it’s imperative that students learn to think critically and tie together history’s connections and how past events often influence and replay today, not just see history in a vacuum, Best noted.

Also, it’s up to young people to stand up to wrongs and injustices amid a culture of growing anti-Semitic hate and violence, as well as that directed against others, Bonnie Duetsch Burdman, the Jewish Federation’s executive director of community relations and government affairs, said.