YOUNGSTOWN - In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day this week, the Jewish Community Relations Council invited a Holocaust survivor to speak with more than 1,000 middle and high school students at Stambaugh Auditorium Wednesday morning.

Helen Marks shared documents and memories of her family being captured by Nazis and separated - with her father sent to Auschwitz - and how they fought to survive the war. Marks had been just two years old when her mother sent her to live with a Catholic family to hide her from Nazis.

"I represent a human being who experienced something and I, as I said, I feel a responsibility for the million and a half children who never got to speak at all," Marks said.

The event, which also invited questions from students, was not only intended to educate about the events of the Holocaust from a unique perspective. It also served as a reminder that the history of that time is not so distant.

"Having been a social studies teacher [...] I realize that words on a printed page don't reach people the way that a face does," Marks added.

She tells 21 News she feels that many who learn about the Holocaust and are not close to someone who has experienced it directly may not be able to comprehend the scale of devastation it caused, and are less likely to have learned from it, or empathize with similar tragedies and acts of hatred or violence in the present.

"There is enough prejudice, enough hatred, enough God-knows-what to keep all kinds of ugly things alive," Marks observed. "If you don't remember history, you are doomed to repeat it. And we are repeating it right now."