The five-member Stern family survived the Holocaust by immigrating to the United States in 1936.
The Bergstein family was not so lucky. Its six members were murdered by the Nazis.
The Sterns, Bergsteins and three other families were the subjects of "A Reason to Remember: Roth, Germany 1933-1942," an exhibit that visited the Donna Klein Jewish Academy in West Boca Raton and several other schools in Palm Beach County earlier this month.
"Some of the wealthiest got out right away; the poorest, with women had the most difficulty," Rabbi Tzvi Berkson, principal for middle and high school Judaic studies at Donna Klein, told a group of 7th graders who toured the exhibit from the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
"I'd like you to notice something real life about them," Berkson said as the students paired off, each pair assigned to trace the Holocaust history of one family from the village of Roth, which was under Nazi rule from 1933 to 1942.
The exhibit was divided into sections that included life before the Nazi regime, the rise of racism, loss of human rights, "The Final Solution" and why the Holocaust should be remembered.
"Holocaust education is part of the whole Jewish education," Berkson told a visitor. All of Donna Klein's students would tour the exhibit, he added. High school students go on the two-week March of the Living trip to Poland where they visit Auschwitz-Birkenau on Holocaust Memorial Day, he said.
The Stern family's Klara Stern, a widow, and her sons Julius and Otto, and their grandmother Hilda Stern got visas quickly from the American Consulate because they were sponsored by wealthy relatives in the U.S.