TUCSON, AZ — As Andrew Schot shuffled through photo albums, he looked at pictures that depicted his life after living through the Holocaust.
He’s 93 years old and still remembers when the Nazis took over his hometown Leeuwarden in the Netherlands.
“This is the only picture that I have that was taken prior to the Holocaust,” he said, holding up a picture when he was just a child.
Schot himself is not a practicing Jew, but because his grandparents were Jewish, German laws at the time considered him Jewish.
“It became tough quite early and then the star of course was the highlight of the thing,” he said. “It made me feel like I was persecuted.”
It was when he was forced to go to a school just for Jewish people that Schot met an acquaintance, a girl that became a staple in Holocaust education, Anne Frank.
“She didn’t play with dolls, she played with soccer in the street with guys and… she was a feisty gal,” he described her.
He also knew her sister Margot, describing her as the opposite of Anne. He also got to know their father Otto Frank and Miep Gies, the woman who helped hide them.
It wasn’t long after he met her, when he was 13 years old, that he was forced into his first concentration camp in Holland before moving to another camp. In total he was in the concentration camps for 13 months. Previous to that he had spent two years in hiding.
“Everybody just lived in it to stay alive and that’s it,” he said about the camps.
He was freed from the camp in 1945 when he was 14 years old, his mother and sister also survivors.
On the boat over to America, his mom encouraged him and his sister to look to the future after having lost many members of their family.
“My mom got us together and she says that…we’re going to a new home, a new life, so let’s forget about the past, let’s not dwell on it,” he said.
However, it wasn’t until almost half a century later in 1996 that he finally made the decision to tell his story.
He was standing in front of a class at a school, when in the back, he noticed someone very special to him.
“I was well into my presentation when I noticed in the back of the class there was my grandson…and that shocked me,” Schot said.
Schot had never told his family about his experiences during the Holocaust and at first he believed his grandson shouldn't be knowing about what he went through. After careful consideration he changed his mind and told his family.
Since then he has spoken at about 30 schools.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne is enforcing a 2021 law that says students have to learn about the Holocaust and other genocides at least once in both middle and high school. He’s requiring schools to report how they teach it and for how long by January 24.
He said it’s a decision he made after seeing pro-Hamas protests and propaganda at the middle and high school levels.
Schot believes teaching about the Holocaust is something that teaches students about everyone the Nazis killed, even the people that weren’t Jewish.
“History tells us if we forget some of these events…they happen again,” Schot said. “I run into a lot of people that have no idea what the Holocaust is all about and that’s scary because it can happen to them.”
