Robbie Waisman's story of beating the effort to exterminate Europe's Jews is one of two remarkable survival stories told to local students yesterday. For a B.C. residential school survivor's story, turn to page 8.

When U.S. soldiers freed 14-year-old Robbie Waisman from a Nazi concentration camp April 11, 1945, he didn't even remember he had a name.

'I was like a wild animal,' Waisman told Whitehorse high school students Thursday morning. 'There was no humanity left in me.'

The soldiers who liberated Buchenwald wanted to know where the children kept there were from, he explained to more than 250 teenagers at F.H. Collins Secondary School. When Waisman's turn to tell them his name came, he reacted automatically.

'I blurted out ... 117089. That was my number I had on my jacket and I responded to the number. I did not have a name.'

Once he realized the soldiers were asking for the name he carried before the Nazis tore his Jewish family apart, he timidly offered his first name, his second name, then his father's name.

'When you are treated as an animal for long enough, you begin to believe it,' said Waisman, now a slight, balding, bespectacled man. 'I certainly did.'

At that point, he believed most of his family was still alive. Indeed, thoughts of arriving home after the war to walk in and surprise his assembled family kept him alive during his stint in a munitions factory and a death camp.

If he'd known his family was dead, 'I can honestly tell you I wouldn't have survived. What for?'

It was a full six months after liberation that Waisman broke down, crying for days.

He and 422 other concentration camp children were sent to France to be normalized, Waisman explained to the student who asked how he reconnected with society.

Nicknamed 'les enfants terrible', the surviving children 'were almost like psychopaths,' said Waisman. Psychologists analyzed and poked the youngsters and wrote them off as unlikely to amount to anything and likely to expect the government to take care of them.

Waisman heads up a Holocaust education centre in Vancouver. He speaks to students across North America while another of the 423 is Israel's chief rabbi and still another is a Nobel Prize winning writer.

'I'm happy to say, so much for the experts,' said Waisman. 'For a bunch of psychopaths, we haven't done badly.'

None of his childhood friends survived the Holocaust, he said, nor did 1,200 of the children in his Polish hometown.

'I think of them when I talk to you,' said Waisman. 'With 1.5 million, you can get lost.'

In 1933, Europe was home to nine million Jews, 3.3 million in Poland. By 1945, six million Jews were murdered, including 1.5 million children. In Waisman's birth country, only 300,000 Jewish people were left alive.

Another six million 'undesirables' such as homosexuals, gypsies and political dissidents died under Adolf Hitler's rein.

The persecution didn't end there. Waisman said he barely made it into Canada, squeaking through the red tape and the requirements to be perfectly healthy.

Landing in Calgary, he became an accountant, married and had two children, a son and daughter.

Asking one day where he could get a passport to get to Vancouver, he was shocked to learn he didn't need papers.

'I was told just to get a driver's licence for a dollar and you can go anywhere you want. I thought, What a country. You don't need a passport, you don't need to go to the police station.''

But despite the trappings of Canadian life, the Holocaust's terror lurked.

He recalls the day his six-year-old daughter told him she wanted to explain a Jewish holiday to her classmates. Waisman 'got panicky' and didn't want his daughter to admit her religion because it might be dangerous.

Instead of going to work that day, Waisman went to the school 'to protect my daughter.' But when she spoke to her class, 'they all loved her.

'And that helped me to become more open, to become a human being.'

At the same age, Waisman had been just as innocent.

As the family baby, he could do no wrong, said Waisman, shaking his head and smiling ruefully about the shenanigans he got away with.

He recalled his eldest brother, a dashing soldier he envisions as James Bond, with a beautiful wife the eight-year-old developed a crush on.

His brother's wife would later choose to go to the gas chambers with her son Nathan rather than using her beauty and youth to survive alone in a work camp.

In September 1937, the first German soldiers arrived to his hometown of Skarszysko, just boys in uniform. After hosting the 'nice young men' to tea, the family assured neighbours nothing bad could happen.

But older soldiers arrived in different uniforms, black with the SS insignia, to round up people for work. He saw his first shooting.

Everyone in his family except himself and his mother registered to work in the munitions factory. His father paid farmers to care for him on their farm, but he hated the cows and ran home. Waisman says he now cherishes the spanking his father gave him.

To this day, he'd give anything for a photograph of his parents.

The Nazis scared people who would have harboured Jewish children by threatening to shoot them and their families, and by offering sacks of sugar and flour in return for bringing Jewish youngsters to SS headquarters.

His oldest brother woke him up at 4 a.m. to hide him on an abandoned farm for two days before returning, agitated and refusing to say why, to fetch him.

The brother smuggled the 11-year-old into the munitions factory, where a job waited. For 12 hours a day, Waisman stamped anti-aircraft shells.

Abraham, a brother two years older, stood in front of him so guards wouldn't spot the smaller boy.

Typhoid fever swept through the barracks and a morning task for some was to pick dead bodies out of the straw bunks.

For 10 days, Waisman hid Abraham in the straw when he fell ill. Even when the older sibling's fever broke, guards spotted his weakness as he stumbled to the work lineup and put him on a truck.

'I had an overwhelming urge to join him,' said Waisman. 'I think he smelled, he sensed, he had not very long to live.'

His brother told him to stay away, and Waisman stood immobilized as he watched the truck fill up and drive into the woods. After he heard the crinkling sound of machine gun fire, the empty truck returned.

'Why did he die? What was his crime? He was a wonderful human being ... But it was an accident of birth. He was born Jewish. And at that time, the world went completely mad.'

Waisman only saw his father, who worked a different shift, on Sundays. The Sunday after Abraham was shot, he saw his father's black hair had turned white.

'When I asked him what was wrong, he kept it from me. It took me all these years to find out.'

It wasn't until Waisman was in Canada 20 years that he learned his oldest brother had been caught planning an escape. The SS had shot the organizers in front of other workers, including their father.

Until then, Waisman hadn't known if his idolized eldest brother was dead or alive.

In 1944, when rumours of advancing Russians had the munitions factory workers believing they were days away from liberation, the soldiers put them all on a train. It stopped periodically to throw off those who died en route.

At Buchenwald, a place he'd never heard of, there were very few left of the 80 who'd started the train journey. When the doors opened, the skinny people in striped uniforms with bulging or sunken eyes didn't even appear human.

A Russian prisoner told him on his way to the showers to tell the guards he was 'a political', not Jewish.

'I didn't know what political meant, but I decided to be political.'

Waisman described standing in the infamous showers with a sliver of soap, wondering if it would be water or lethal gas coming out of the shower heads.

It was a unit of black American troops who liberated Waisman's camp. Having never seen blacks before, the 14-year-old reached out to touch and be hugged by a 20-year-old soldier from Philadelphia.

His only sister was liberated from Bergen-Belsen, the only other member of the family to survive, and has never been able to talk about her experiences.

Their mother died in Treblinka's gas chambers.

'No one ever came back from Treblinka.'

Before receiving a standing ovation from the teenagers he'd moved to tears for an hour Thursday morning, Waisman asked them to forgive their siblings' filching of a favoured CD or sweater and give them something besides anger.

'Forget that for a moment and instead give them a hug because what you have is precious.'