Survivor, scholar speak at Lakeland

According to an email sent by David Gallianetti, students taking the history of the Holocaust class at Lakeland College in Sheboygan heard from two people with expert knowledge of the subject: a survivor, and an alumnus who became a Holocaust scholar.

Poland-native Robert Matzner, 85, was 13 when the German Nazis invaded. He survived a ghetto and the Auschwitz camp. He came to the U.S. in 1950, and worked in Sheboygan for more than 30 years before retiring. He wrote a memoir of his experiences, “Prisoner 19053,” published in 2008 by the Sheboygan County Historical Research Center.

Karl Schleunes is a 1959 graduate of Lakeland, who earned his doctorate at the University of Minnesota and who retired this year after teaching for more than three decades at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of “The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy Toward German Jews, 1933-1939” (1970) and “Legislating the Holocaust” (2001).

Lakeland’s Holocaust class is taught by assistant professor of history Krista Feinberg.