Holocaust survivor Harold Reissner, 85, of Barrington, spoke to students at West Warwick High School yesterday about his time in concentration camps during World War II. Asked if was angry at God for what happened, he said, “God didn’t do it. People did.”

The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

WEST WARWICK — Harold Reissner had what he describes as an “active, happy” childhood. He played sports, he was a Boy Scout, he attended the local public school.

At age 13 he had his bar mitzvah, the ceremony that marks the coming of age for Jewish boys.

It should have been a happy time, but for Reissner, life in his hometown of Furth, in southern Germany, was about to take a dramatic turn.

Soon, he was no longer welcome at school. Friends ignored him. Some taunted him, calling him a “dirty Jew.” Or they spat on him.

“Things changed very quickly,” the 85-year-old Barrington resident told about 100 students yesterday at West Warwick High School.

It was the mid-1930s, and the Nazi campaign of atrocities against the Jews would only escalate. By age 17, Reissner had been shipped with his parents and younger brother to a concentration camp in Latvia. Nazi SS troops stormed the train as people were let off the cattle cars, killing some refugees on the spot.

The camp, on a dilapidated farm, was the first of seven Reissner would see during World War II.

It was a time of scavenging for food, of trying to avoid Nazi guards who sometimes used prisoners for target practice, of waking up in the straw and finding someone next to you had died overnight from the cold or sickness or lack of food.

Miraculously, Reissner’s family stayed together for 2½ years, until he and his father and brother were shipped to yet another camp while his mother stayed behind.

“I saw her for the last time over a barbed-wire fence,” he said. “I still see her and it’s difficult to talk about it.”

INVITED BY Brenda Johnson DeLuise, a special-education teacher whose students recently read Night, a firsthand Holocaust account, Reissner spoke in a soft, matter-of-fact tone, sometimes reading from notes. Students sat transfixed as he described the living conditions and the trail of death left by the Nazis.

At one camp, there was a mountain of suitcases, all filled with people’s belongings. Reissner later learned that the earlier captives had been taken out in the woods and shot.

But he also recalled a couple of lighter moments amid the madness — like the time he volunteered to fix the commandant’s motorcycle, despite knowing nothing about motorcycles. He took out the sparkplug, stuck his finger in, played around with the wires, and got it to start.

Then the commandant insisted he take it outside the camp for a test ride.

Reissner said he rode out and drove around for a while. When he returned, the commandant seemed worried.

“You could have been killed,” he told the youth.

Reissner said he survived because he managed to eat and stay healthy, sometimes by volunteering for kitchen duty, which meant he could scavenge food and share it with his father and brother.

The three were still together in April 1945, when he came down with typhoid fever. Because of his illness, he did not take part in a death march, as the Allies were getting nearer by the day, that took his father and brother and other Jews away from the camp.

Reissner said he and a few others who were left behind hid in the dirt under floorboards of a camp building for three or four days until the sound of heavy equipment drew them out.

The sound was from Americans soldiers.

FOR THE STUDENTS, Reissner’s account yesterday made everything they had learned more real.

“I was just blown away,” said Chelsea Field, 16, a sophomore. “I just met him but I feel like I’ve known him.”

One student asked if he was angry at God for what happened. Reissner said no.

“God didn’t do it. People did,” he said.

Reissner settled in New York City after coming to America in 1946. He married, raised two sons and worked in sales for a wax-making company. He moved to Rhode Island about 10 years ago. Today, he is one of about a dozen Holocaust survivors still living in the state, said Selma Stanzler, former president of the Holocaust Education and Resource Center of Rhode Island.

He started talking publicly about his experiences eight years ago.

redgar@projo.com