The topic of the night was the Holocaust and the speaker was someone who traveled to Germany to revisit concentration camps in order to learn more about the life of Jews during WWII.

Ron Krull, a middle school teacher in Ames, spoke to a group of about 20 students last week in the Knapp/Storms Commons area about a trip he was chosen to take in Germany last summer to study the Holocaust.

Krull, along with 24 other teachers from around the United States, went to WWII concentration camps that the Nazis used to execute Jews during the war, he said.

The group took a tour of the famous Warsaw Ghetto to learn about what life was like for those who were there. Krull said the ghetto, which originally held 40,000 Jews, peaked at 400,000 as more and more trains brought Jews taken from there homes to be executed in the camps.

“Every day you didn’t know if the train would come to take you away,” Krull said.

Krull said he learned about the wide range of emotions experienced by those who were there.

He said the young people in the camps were often pessimistic, while the older generation was optimistic about the future. He said the young people believed everyone would be killed and the older people said it could never get that bad.

Krull said the Jews were kept in many places in the camps.

A 3-foot by 3-foot cell housed three people in some cases. Their quarters were so tight that often Jews were forced to continually stand.

However, Krull said one of the most memorable sights he saw was the infamous gas chambers, in which thousands of Jews were killed.

He described the chambers as concrete rooms with a small box in the ceiling that released the gas. Krull said he could still see the scratches on the doors of the chambers from those who tried to escape.

Another sight he will not soon forget, Krull said, was a building packed with thousands and thousands of shoes confiscated from those who were killed.

“It’s a smell I’ll never forget,” Krull said.

The group also visited the famous Treblinka concentration camp. Treblinka had a staff of 130 officers who killed 800,000 people in 6 months, he said. Krull said the average life span of the Jewish prisoner was about two hours at the camp.

The executions were so widespread, that of the 3 million Jews who lived in Poland prior to the Holocaust, only 3,000 survived, Krull said.

Krull said the annual trip for which he was chosen is designed to keep new generations informed about the atrocities of the past.

The trip is funded by the American Gathering Federation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, The Jewish Labor Committee, the American Federation of Teachers, Yad Veshem of Jerusalem and the Ghetto Fighters House of Israel.

Over 500 American teachers have taken the trip.

“It’s up to us to guarantee there were survivors, because in 10 years, there will be no survivors,” Krull said.