PINE BUSH � "I am a holocaust survivor," said the older gentleman, sitting in the pit at Pine Bush High School Library. "My name is Kuba Beck. I graduated from school in 1939. I lived in Cracow, Poland, and I was just a normal person. I played soccer; that was my favorite sport."

Listening intently to Beck were students from Pine Bush High School, who filled "the pit" and lined the rail above. It was a moment that most of those students will never forget, coming face to face with someone who was about their age when his world was smashed by Adolf Hitler and the German Army.

On September 1, 1939, the Germans invaded Poland. The modernized Wehrmacht quickly destroyed the Polish Army, demonstrating Blitzkrieg for the first time to an astonished world. As Beck put it, "Things quickly went from bad to worse." Kuba Beck and his family were left, along with all of Poland's Jews, to face the fury of the Nazis.

For Beck and his family, this meant a descent into hell. First came yellow armbands for Jews, then the expropriation of their businesses and property. When they were sufficiently pauperized, they were stuffed into the ghetto. Kuba Beck's parents had owned a hardware store.

"One day a Nazi came in and told us he was the new owner, and we would now work for him."

With friends and family gathered in their house, they had "three families in every room."

But, all this was just the warm up for the Final Solution.

Kuba Beck was very fortunate. After being fired from his job at the store, he had signed up at a metal factory and become a tool and die maker. That meant he travelled outside the ghetto every day. One day he left for work, and while he was gone, the Germans "liquidated" the ghetto. They put the Jews of Cracow into trains of cattle cars and sent them several hundred miles away, to a death camp, where they were gassed.

"The last time I saw my parents, my family, was that morning. When I came home, they were gone."

Meanwhile, Kuba was discovering that among non-Jews there were those who would risk severe punishment, even death, to help him.

"People gave food to me at the factory, and once in a while I smuggled food into the ghetto. I was lucky, I was never searched."

Meanwhile, those left behind in the ghetto had no idea of what had happened to those who had been taken on the trains. Strange, terrifying rumors began to swirl around the ghetto. The remainder of ghetto inhabitants were sent to a camp nearby. Kuba worked in the metal shop. "Conditions in the camp were horrible. Very little food. In the morning a little coffee in a bowl for breakfast. For lunch a little bit soup. For dinner more soup, maybe some potatoes and a scrap of meat. Plus one eighth of a loaf of bread. The worst thing was that you never knew when a Nazi might decide to kill you. One day I was walking with some other men to the shop, and a Nazi called out the man next to me, and shot him in the head."

But, Kuba Beck also had a great bit of good fortune, because one day he was put on a truck with some others and taken to Oskar Schindler's factory.

Ultimately this saved his life, along with the others on Schindler's list, immortalized by Steven Spielberg's film of that name.

However, the terror was never completely banished from their lives. "One day they took away our clothes and gave us striped uniforms instead. My wife, who I met in the factory, she got scissors and a needle and reworked the dress they gave her, which was like a sack. She took it in, cut off some of the extra length and made a belt with it. But the SS guardwoman beat her up for that and ordered her to be executed the next day."

Oskar Schindler took care of it by bribing the guard, while Kuba's wife undid her work on the sacklike prison dress.

Meanwhile, the Germans were losing the war to the Russians, and the Red Army was flowing westwards into Poland. Schindler's factory was moved to Czechoslovakia, and the young Kuba was sent to the Gross Rosen Concentration Camp complex. He continued to work at Schindler's factory, but at night was shipped to the camp. Conditions in the SS-operated Gross Rosen camps were "horrible," said Beck. But, both Kuba and his eventual wife, Helen, survived them, and in May 1945, the Russians liberated the camps.

Reunited with Helen, Beck eventually gave up on Poland, where anti-Semitism continued, and moved to America.

"We came to Lynn, Massachusetts, and we were there six years. We became citizens, and this was very important for us."

IBM offered him a job, and sent him to get an engineering degree. Kuba Beck then spent 32 years working for Big Blue in Poughkeepsie.

Now retired, and alone after the death of his wife, Kuba Beck prefers to remember the good men and women. "There were many who risked everything to help Jewish people, even their lives." Those like Oskar Schindler, who did what they could in the face of the enormity of the Nazi genocide.

School Superintendent Phil Steinberg said, "I saw the expressions on the faces of the young people as they heard Mr. Beck tell his story, and I think that is the key to remembering what happened. Because when all the survivors are gone, it is those children who will remember, because they heard it directly from Kuba Beck."

Speaking of the challenges we face today in terms of diversity, Steinberg added, "How do we change people's inbred prejudices? How do we make them understand that we will no longer persecute people because of their national origins, or the color of their skin, or their religion? I think that lessons like this one, getting a survivor to come in and tell their story, that's one way we can do it."