At age 9, she was forced to wear the yellow star. At the age of 14, she pretended to be 18 to escape selection in Auschwitz. By the time she was 15, she had lost her entire family.

Anita Schorr, a native of Czechoslovakia, shared her horrifying experiences as a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust to Professor Diane Feigenson’s Literature of the Holocaust class on March 12.

Schorr, now age 78, survived the Jewish ghetto, Terezin, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belson concentration camps by ‘more than luck.’ She explained how determination and hope helped her get by.

One example of a ‘more than luck’ situation was when during selection at Auschwitz the notorious Dr. Mengele grouped her with the young and old ‘- the group that would soon be heading to their deaths.

‘My whole body reacted. I thought I would explode,’ she said, recalling how she felt.

To escape the gas chambers, she ran to the latrine unnoticed and was able to slip through the second selection.

Despite this determination to stay alive, Schorr was not immune to the suffering of daily concentration camp life. Hunger ate away at her day and night. Lice infested her bed and clothes. She never knew if the shower would be a shower or a deadly gas chamber.

‘They took away your humanity. They took away your courage. They took away your will to live,’ Schorr said of the Nazis, as she lifted her sleeve to show the number ‘71569′ still tattooed on her left forearm.

At the age of 14 she was forced to separate from her mother, who stayed behind with her 9-year-old brother. Schorr’s mother had told her to lie and say she was 18 so she could be transported from Bergen-Belson to Hamburg, Germany, for slave labor. Shortly after, both her mother and brother were murdered.

‘At the timeI did not understand why my mother felt this was the safest option,’ she said. ‘I thought my mother didn’t love me.’

Throughout her several years in the camps, questions continually haunted her: Why didn’t the free world say anything? Why are people letting millions of innocent people be murdered? Why was the world silent?

Today Schorr is not silent. After moving to Israel at the end of the war, she came to America, where she now resides in Westport, Connecticut, and has been sharing her story across the nation for over a decade.

‘In a lifetime of one person, I would like to see peace,’ Schorr said. As a survivor of a genocide that murdered 6 million Jews, she had believed that the world would change since the Holocaust. Unfortunately, she said she still sees anti-Semitism, genocide, and other acts of hatred around the world.’

The classroom was absolutely silent as they listened to her courageous journey.

‘I thought the speaker was quite powerful,’ said Karisten Strong ‘10, an international studies major. ‘I feel very fortunate to be able to hear first-hand accounts of the Holocaust because our generation will be the last to experience this.’