YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (WKBN) – The Jewish Community Relations Council of Youngstown hosted an educational opportunity at Stambaugh Auditorium on Thursday for the public to hear from a Holocaust survivor.
Art Gelbart now lives in Cleveland. He was held in a German concentration camp for two years before being forced on a death march.
He was liberated on April 11, 1945.
“You see your friends. You see people that you walked with, and people just kind of gave up,” he recalled.
Sharing stories to high school students of his life in Poland before his family was taken, he detailed the horrors he endured and shared a message of survival.
“Unless you can see that and keep on walking, you’re not going to make it,” he said.
It is a message that sounds familiar to Terri Anderson. Her father, Henry Kinast, is also a Holocaust survivor, detained in the very same concentration camp.
“When I met him a few years ago, I couldn’t believe they were together. They’re in a famous picture together,” said Terri Anderson, daughter of a Holocaust survivor.
Anderson said her father was tight-lipped about his experience when she was younger, but he slowly opened up over the years.
“I couldn’t comprehend that he lost his mother at a young age and what he endured,” Anderson said.
Years later, their shared suffering is still delivering that powerful message.
“Kids today should not forget that this can happen to anybody,” Anderson said.
