By KPNX via CNN Newsource, June 11, 2024. Click for full report.
CHANDLER, Ariz. (KPNX) – A 98-year-old Holocaust survivor reflected on an incredible milestone, saying he cried as he was honored with the high school diploma he was unable to earn during the war.
Oskar Knoblauch missed a significant portion of his education due to the Holocaust, so he hadn’t graduated from high school – until now. The 98-year-old received an honorary diploma May 20 from Chandler High School in Arizona.
“It was so heartwarming, so different, so refreshing,” he said. “I was in tears. I was being accepted.”
The experience, which came after Knoblauch’s granddaughter contacted the school, meant a lot to the 98-year-old.
“I did graduate from high school,” he said. “It was unbelievable.. .. It will stay with me forever.”
The recognition highlights Knoblauch’s strong passion for educating youth, advocating for “No Place For Hate” and working with the Arizona Jewish Historical Society.
Anthony Fusco, the society’s associate director of education, looks at Knoblauch as a mentor and knows his story well.
“He was a survivor with a very unique perspective of the Holocaust,” Fusco said. “He lived and breathed with the perpetrator. He was in the Gestapo headquarters in Pomorska, which was a labor camp in Poland. Luckily, he escaped eight months before liberation, but his dad was taken.”
Knoblauch said he “suffered a lot,” both mentally and physically, during that time of his life, but he is truly the definition of resilience.
“I maintained my self-composure as a human being throughout all this – what the Germans were putting on my shoulders,” he said.
For more than 17 years, Knoblauch has been teaching at Chandler schools and through organizations around the globe, sharing the importance of remembering the Holocaust. He also asks people to speak up when they see anyone being bullied or harassed and challenges them to be loving and kind to others.
“Go to a school, go to a retirement home, read a book, a story to someone. There’s always someone who needs something. You don’t have to spend money on it, just your time,” Knoblauch said.
Knoblauch has written an autobiography called “A Boy’s Story, A Man’s Memory – Surviving the Holocaust 1933-1945.”
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