Holocaust Survivor Helen Sperling Speaks At Hamilton College

Helen Sperling is a survivor of the Holocaust who has spent the last few decades talking to students and groups about her experience during a time when she lost nearly everyone and everything that she knew.

Sperling was at Hamilton college on Monday - a day before her 94th birthday - to recount her life before, during and after she and her family were rounded up by German soldiers and taken to Nazi concentration camps.

Sperling gave a full account of what it was like hearing what Adolf Hitler was planning to do in Europe, and explained in detail what it was like being moved first out of her home near Warsaw, Poland to a Jewish "ghetto" in the inner city and after that to a series of concentration camps where she was first separated from her family.

During the lecture Sperling recounted the hunger and hoplessness she endured with remarkable clarity and detail.

Sperling shared the only photographs of her parents that she has with the hushed audience as she told the story of the last time she saw them before being split up at the first of multiple camps she was held in.

Helen Sperling was liberated from Buchenwald in April 1945, and after three years of recovery from the physical damage she sustained at the hands of the Nazis, was reunited with her younger brother who found her after being apart for years.