Holocaust survivor Stanley Bernath visited Greg Deegan’s Human Rights and Conflict (HRC) class on Oct. 31 to speak about his experiences in a Nazi concentration camp.

“HRC students were able to hear about his early life and brutal struggles at the hands of Nazis in a number of concentration camps,” Deegan said.  “It will certainly help them understand the Holocaust more fully.”

For more than ten years, Deegan has asked Bernath to speak to his students after the class finishes their study of the Holocaust.

Bernath is a native of Romania who was liberated from a concentration camp in Ebensee on May 6, 1945 when he was 17 years old, according to the Cleveland Jewish News. He now celebrates May 6 as his birthday every year.

“That’s when I was reborn,” Bernath told BHS students in 2013, as quoted in the Cleveland Jewish News. “If I had been there one more day, I would have been [dead].”

Bernath and the other prisoners  were starved in the camp. When he was liberated in 1945, Bernath weighed only 65 pounds. On that day, he was eating grass and worms while lying on the ground.

Deegan was introduced to Bernath by former student Ronie Cohen. Since then, Bernath has come regularly to speak to Deegan’s students about his experiences.

Bernath has spoken regularly at other schools as well.

In his speech at BHS, Bernath emphasized the challenges of life in the Nazi prison camps. Inmates scrambled for food in a world where starvation and torture were daily occurrences.

However, one day Bernath was working near a Nazi guard tower when a miracle occurred. While he was working, a small package dropped, as if from the sky.

He was not sure whether he should open it and take the risk of being shot. He took the risk, picked up the package, hid behind barracks and opened it. Inside the package he found a sandwich. A Nazi soldier, whom Bernath never met, kept sending him food for two weeks.

In an email, Deegan commented on this story as the most meaningful part of Bernath’s talk.

“That same Nazi soldier, whom he never met, did that for two weeks and restored Stanley’s hope in humanity, giving him inspiration to get through each day with the knowledge that not all Nazis were monsters,” Deegan wrote.

Even though he was in a horrifying place, Bernath tried to stay hopeful. He emphasized the importance of focusing on the positive.

“Hatred is a parasite that infects your brain,” he said.

Students are awed by Bernath’s abillity to keep hope and love in his heart, despite having lived through horrors that others can only imagine.

“Mr. Bernath is my hero,” Deegan wrote. “ He experienced incredible hardship at the hands of Nazis, and he maintains an incredible attitude of hope and resilience.  [In spite of everything,] he doesn’t hate his oppressors.”