On May 3, Greeley West High School was visited by Holocaust survivor Peter Daniels.  Daniels spoke in the auditorium during third and fourth period classes.  AVID students and history teachers brought their classes to hear the presentation.

Daniels was born in Berlin in 1936, during a time when Jews were not allowed to have radios or have newspapers delivered.  This meant Daniels and his mother knew very little about what was going on around them.

He shared with the audience that the Holocaust all began for him when a few police officers arrested him and his mother and they were taken to a detention center. “We stayed there for a few weeks so we must have had some food with us, we were doing something right,” he remembered.

While staying at the detention center, he came down with a fever and a Nazi official sent him to the hospital and he returned to the detention center after a couple of days. Two days after returning from the hospital he was thrown into a cattle car with his mother and another 98 people for about a 24 hour trip to a concentration camp where they were forced to stand the entire time.

After he got off the train, he was to walk for an hour to his camp in a single file line to be processed the next morning. He was separated from his mother and lived in very poor conditions. Daniels told the audience, “We were served a bowl of warm water and we were lucky if we saw a potato peel floating in it and a small piece of bread every day.”

The only reason why he worked packing boxes was to be awarded with another meal. in just two years, 100 children survived out of 1500.  Daniel’s said that if your age wasn’t from 14 to about 50 you were immediately send into a gas chamber. May 8th 1945 the war ended and he and his mom returned to Berlin for a few months then he was off to New York, where he was happy to live in a free country.

Daniels told the audience how powerful of an experience it was to be told the meaning of the Statue of Liberty as they passed it on the boat into the United States.

“When he was speaking, he told us about the time they were holding white boxes and one of them fell to the ground and it had a skull in it,” freshman Nayra Andrade said.  “It just made me feel really bad and I felt really afraid for him in that position.”