Nazi-camp survivor breathes life into lessons - An Omaha woman shares her Holocaust memories with Catholic grade school students.
Bea Karp was only 10 at the time, but she vividly recalls the brown, gray and black walls of the concentration camp, the 9 o'clock roll call, the meager loaf of bread she and other children and women had to share in the barracks.
The women and children were so hungry, they fought over food.
"It was terrible. These women, who had been ladies at one time, turned into animals," Karp said.
Karp, now 72, spoke Monday about her experience in a Nazi concentration camp. About 170 students at St. James Seton School in Omaha listened attentively.
Born in Germany in 1932, Karp recalls encountering anti-Semitism at a young age. It escalated in 1940 when the Gestapo barged into her home and ordered the family to pack a small suitcase. They were deported to an internment camp in France.
The men were placed in separate barracks from the women and children. But that did not stop Karp and her little sister from marching past a Nazi guard to visit her father.
She recalls the day that the men were given raw eggs. Her father discovered his egg was bloody: an offense to his religious beliefs as an Orthodox Jew. To Karp's horror, he threw the egg against the wall.
Driven by hunger, "I ran over to the wall to lick it off," Karp said, "but then I saw the expression on my father's face, and I couldn't do it."
She did not understand the lesson her father taught her that day until nearly two years later, after she and her sister had moved from the camp to the safety of a Catholic convent. They were aided by a French relief group.
Karp told one of the nuns that it would be easier to be Catholic than Jewish. The nun explained, though, that Karp had a choice to keep or change her beliefs.
Karp said that's when she realized that by throwing the bloody egg, her father was telling her she had a choice even when others were trying to control her. She chose to remain Jewish.
In June 1945, she and her sister had the good fortune to go stay with relatives in England. The sisters later moved to New York. When they were older, they learned that their parents had been killed in the camps.
Today, Karp lives in Omaha.
St. James students in the seventh and eighth grades have been studying the Holocaust in their literature classes.
Katie Leise, a seventh-grader, said hearing Karp's experience made their studies seem more important and more real.
"It's hard to think why someone could just go and kill millions of people," Katie said.
