Event # 2-The Fifth Diamond-

This event took place in the Parker building in room 123 on the 25th of November. Irene Weisberg Zisblatt is the Holocaust survivor and the author of The Fifth Diamond. She gave a speech about her life story and how she survived the Holocaust. She grew up in Hungary, but her world soon failed apart when Hitler recommended that all Jews were killed. She talked about her family and recounted the last time she saw them alive. She was taken into a concentration camp and was forced to give all her belongings. Her mom gave her five diamonds so she could buy bread when she gets hungry. Since she didn’t want to give the only memories that her mom gave her, she had to swallow them. She witnessed and experienced unspeakable cruelty at the camp. However, she survived. It took her fifty years to let go of the terror of her experience and speak about it. She encourages us, children and teenagers of today to tell her story. Her exact words were: "You are the last generation to meet a Holocaust survivor, so help me share the story when I am no longer here." Everybody that was listening to her speech was in tears as she told her painful life story.
I selected this event because my composition professor told me about it and I was curious to see what Irene Weisberg Zisblatt, the Holocaust survivor, had to say. This event contributes to the college theme of life and death because it’s about the life experiences of Irene and the death of all her family members and everyone she cared for. It shows how important life can be to someone once they experience death. I will definitely encourage other students to go listen to her speech if she ever comes back to the school, to read her book -The Fifth Diamond- and to watch the documentary-The Last Days-.