(students chattering) - [Announcer] It was a noisy middle school cafeteria full of hungry kids.

By the end of the day, these students will have learned about true hunger and its place in history.

(haunting piano music) - [Instructor] Look what happens to the body if you don't get to eat.

It literally starts, like Benton said, to feed off of itself to the point where these people were nothing but skin and bones.

(haunting orchestral music) - [Announcer] Eighth graders in the Seneca Valley School District are learning about the Holocaust by thinking about food, and what it's like not have it.

- Today I got one kilogram of parsley.

My father, brother, and I ate it raw.

We live worse than animals.

- [Announcer] They are the words of a girl who wrote a diary while she and her family were imprisoned in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland in 1942.

Polish Jews were fenced in, forced to work in Nazi factories, barely surviving on meager rations.

- [Miranda] A small amount of coffee, a small amount of rye flour, a small amount of white sugar, a small amount of margarine, a small amount of peas, a small amount of pickled beets.

- [Announcer] Those rations would have to feed a family of five for two weeks.

The students did the math: each person would receive 83 calories a day.

- That's like living on a pack of little mini fruit snacks.

- And there's people that knew my dad, when they see me now, and they say, "Oh my God, you are exactly like Simon."

- [Announcer] Steven Gelernter's dad Simon was in the Lodz Ghetto when he was a teenager.

- He would tell me probably remembers the most three days of not eating, scavenging for food, whatever they could find, scraps, whatever's left on the bone, potato peels.

At one point, he was down to 115 pounds, and he was about 5'10".

- [Announcer] As was the fate of many in the ghetto, Simon was deported to the Auschwitz concentration and death camp.

He survived, and was liberated.

- He was the poorest of poor, and he was sponsored by someone here in Pittsburgh.

They were able to provide him a job, and he ended up learning a trade as a drapery installer.

- [Announcer] Here in Pittsburgh, Simon and met and married Francine, who also survived Auschwitz and its brutal hunger.

- She would wait and watch people and kind of hang around the people that were near death because you would take what they had.

You need to do whatever you can to survive, and that's one of the many things that still bothers my mom to this day.

(haunting strings music) - But everyone understands hungry, but they don't understand this level of hunger and what it did to these people.

Why the Holocaust is so complex and kids are never gonna get an understanding of the Holocaust based on the three weeks that we're working on it.

Just the understanding of a glimpse into what was going on.

- The purpose of this journal was to, like, tell us, like, how much food we have compared to, like, how much the girl had.

I said I chicken wings, five Nature Valley bars, some watermelon, and just some water.

- And then, for dinner, I had like a Caesar salad, tortellini, bread, and milk.

Like they were struggling, like, sometimes a single sandwich for like a week at a time, but, like, we just eat it without even thinking about it.

(acoustic guitar music) - [Announcer] These students performed a Yiddish song, the lament of a man who lost his wife to the Holocaust, the same feelings reflected in the writings of that hungry girl in the ghetto.

(singing in foreign language) - It's so humbling to learn about how these people must have lived, and then to look at myself, my lifestyle.

(singing in foreign language) - What she had to worry about all the time was am I going to get food?

Am I, is my family going to live, am I going to live?

What's my future gonna be?

Because they were constantly living in uncertainty.

(singing in foreign language) I'm thinking that if, like, if I put myself in her shoes, I would not last a day like that.

(singing in foreign language) - They are deporting people all the time.

Right now, they are deporting families.

60 husbands or childrens.

And that's where it stops.

- [Announcer] And it was in the middle of a sentence.

- [Miranda] Yeah.

- [Announcer] What does that make you think?

- [Miranda] I think she was deported, or maybe shot.

(haunting strings music) - [Announcer] It is not known why the diary ended so abruptly, nor what happened to the girl or her family.

Simon Gelernter went on to live a good life, raised a family, played tennis, and skied.

He died of a heart attack at age 70 on the slopes in Colorado.

His impossible early years are a reminder.

- It's part of history.

This isn't something fabricated.

I'm living proof of it.

It's paramount that we teach our youth so we never again, never forget.

- It showed us that all the food that we have, we take if for granted, 'cause we eat all this food, and all of it, and we always complain that we're hungry.

But we don't know true hunger because of people that used to be starving.

(haunting strings music) (singing in foreign language)