Holocaust survivors teach Maryland students about experiences They choose to honor the lives lost - with volunteer work, speeches and one small silver pin that carries their message, written in Hebrew. "Remember," it says, affixed to their lapels. So they do. Five Holocaust survivors spoke to 300 seventh-graders at Eastern Middle School in Silver Spring on Tuesday morning to share their stories - and the stories of their families and friends, as well as strangers. "I even myself don't want to talk about it, but I think they should know these things," said David Bayer. It's horror stories. They came as part of a program aimed at connecting curriculum with real life. The students are reading Anne Frank's diary and "All but My Life," the memoirs of a Polish woman who spent time in several work camps. "Any time we can take something in history and actually bring participants, it's huge," said the school's magnet coordinator, Matt Johnson. The survivors, Halina Peabody, 79, and Henry Greenbaum, 84, both of Bethesda, and Nesse Godin, 84, Manny Mandel, 76, and Bayer, 90, all of Silver Spring, are volunteers at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in the District. Tuesday's event was the product of a partnership between the school and Montgomery College, according to art history professor Ken Jassie. This is the sixth time survivors have visited the middle school to talk to students. The students seemed to be interested in the survivors, Johnson said, and were very attentive and asked questions. "That's a big deal for middle-schoolers," he said. Bayer told of how he was just weeks from turning 17 when the Germans invaded Poland. He lived through the ghetto, a labor camp, the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, experimental surgery, death marches and several escape attempts, including one in which he was shot in the leg. He had been held for six months when he finally got away. It was January 1945, and he found himself hiding in the woods near Auschwitz-Birkenau with two Russian prisoners, living on margarine and snow. Starving, they left the woods after six days, taking a chance. They walked out to find that the Soviets had liberated the camp. "A Russian picked me up and carried me like a sack of potatoes," he said. Seventh-grader Simon Gershunskiy, 12, of Rockville said he was moved by Bayer's speech. "The way that he speaks, because he's experienced such horrors, it can really touch you," Simon said. "It was something that I'm very much going to remember," he said. Godin was 13 when the Nazis first came to her town in Lithuania. "Just one year older than you guys," she said with a thick accent to her audience of 12-year-olds. My life changed. What is a Jew? Godin asked. It's not how we look. It's how we pray. Godin grew up in a democratic Lithuania. Her mother owned a dairy store, and her father worked in the office of a shoe factory. "As a Jewish little girl, I played with non-Jewish children," she said. But when the Germans came, Godin said neighbors turned on each other.