SouthFlorida.com | Teen Link South Florida

She changed my life with three simple words, words that hold the deepest meaning of all.

Irene Zisblatt came that day to tell a group of unaffected high school seniors her story. She had no expectations from us but to listen.

As she opened her black book full of notes and unwanted memories, the gym fell uncomfortably silent. She began, and I listened.

She told us about her life in Poland in the 1930s and how it suddenly came to a stop when the Nazis packed her family and all the Jews from her village into cattle cars. They traveled in fear, darkness and hunger for days, not knowing their destination. They did not know they were being shipped off to their deaths, to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

They were destined to be exterminated as part of Hitler's "Final Solution."

As I sat there, cramped on the bleachers, I felt alone. I thought about Zisblatt's story. From one man's hate and power came the extermination of an entire population of children, parents and grandparents because they were different.

I finally understood the power of hatred.

With a shaky voice, Zisblatt told of the atrocities she encountered under the merciless experiments of Dr. Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death." She survived every experiment, and although the physical marks of those experiments are still visible, they do not defeat her.

Despite losing her childhood, her family and dignity, Zisblatt said she never lost faith in God. She knew she couldn't make it without Him. That faith helped her survive the worst genocide of the century.

Zisblatt's visit was made in part to promote the book she wrote about her experience, The Fifth Diamond, which released this spring.

The first words I heard her say that day were "I love you." Not the "I love you" that people throw around all the time, but the "I love you" that gives you butterflies inside because you know it's sincere. That was all she had to say to get her message through to me.

Later, I asked her how she was able to say those words so sincerely to a bunch of strangers. "Because I see every child as my own," she replied.

As a child of the Holocaust, Zisblatt focuses her attention on youths ages 12 to 18 because she believes a child should never experience what happened in those camps, yet they should know the capabilities of hatred.

As teens, we must learn from the mistakes of the past.

"My duty is to be the voice of the children of the Holocaust … because I made a promise to the victims in the gas chambers to be their voice," Zisblatt said. "This is why I wrote my book The Fifth Diamond."

It took Zisblatt 50 years to speak about what she witnessed. Not until Steven Spielberg featured her in his documentary The Last Days did she speak about the camps.

Today, she travels throughout South Florida to talk to students about the destruction of hatred.

Through her story of hope and survival, she spreads a message of love, compassion and open-mindedness.