Kids at a local summer camp got the lesson of a lifetime, learning about one of the world’s worst atrocities and hearing from people who survived it.

At the Shirley Proctor Puller Foundation’s MASTR kids summer program, learning about the past with a present-day perspective is nothing new. After the death of George Floyd, kids at the predominately Black student program got to hear from civil rights activists and advocates who explained the history while addressing the current trauma. This summer they learned about the Holocaust and the biggest lesson they learned came from the very people who survived it.

Sylvia Richman is a Holocaust survivor and a board member for the Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services nonprofit. She shared her story with a group of third and fourth graders about how she survived the Holocaust when she was their age.

“How did I survive? I survived by how do you say, by being, behaving myself as a little girl and listening to my teachers,” Richman said.

Some details of her story were tough to hear.

“My mother found out a few days later that there was an opening in one of the walls of the ghetto and she and I crawled out of it in the middle of the night,” she explained.

She shared stories and answered questions about concentration camps; her being placed in orphanages and being separated from her parents, all from the ages of five to eight years old.

The stories sounded a lot like the one Ciera Jackson read about at the MASTR kids summer camp.

“They had to go through showers, gas chambers and they got killed for only for how they were and what they believed in,” Jackson said.

For Jackson, this was more than just a history lesson.

“It makes me feel disappointed and sad,” she said.

Richman explained to the group more about the sad stories from the Holocaust.

“Each survivor has different stories. My story is, that’s why I talk to younger children, is that I had a happy ending. Bad things happened, but I had a happy ending,” she said.

Richman was one of two Holocaust survivors who spoke to two different groups at the MASTR kids summer camp. Both survivors are with the Gulf Coast Jewish Family and Community Services nonprofit. Organizers with the nonprofit said they want more survivors to contact them so they can share their stories and provide help if needed.