HOLOCAUST survivor Henry Schachter has told the moving story of his life and losses to schoolchildren in Pembrokeshire.

Mr Schachter, 80, whose parents both perished in captivity in World War Two, was at Tenby’s Greenhill School on Thursday – five years after his first visit there, when a memorial tree was planted.

He returned to the school at the invitation of its Holocaust Educational Trust ambassadors. The four sixth-formers had visited the Auschwitz concentration camp as part of the organisation’s programme.

Said one, Roy Edwards, 17: “The Holocaust survivors are not going to live forever, so it is very important to keep the message going for the next generation.”

Mr Schachter, who had travelled to Tenby from his home in Bournemouth with his daughter Hope, told Greenhill’s Year 9 pupils: “My story is how at least one little Jewish boy did not become part of the 1.5million Jewish children who were murdered by the Nazis.”

His family escaped Germany for Poland after the Kristallnacht attacks in 1938, but then the invasion of the country saw them fleeing to Belgium.

Mr Schachter was a young baby, whose mother was forced to drug him into silence to enable them to be safely smuggled across the border.

Once in Brussels, his parents took the heart-breaking decision to give him to a Christian family to bring up, so that he would not be targeted by the Nazis.

“My mother visited me on my fifth birthday,” he recalled. “When she left, I was so upset I refused to say goodbye to her.

“I never saw her again. Seven weeks later, she was caught and taken to Auschwitz.

“It’s a memory which will live with me forever.”

Mr Schachter’s mother was later sent to Belsen on the same convoy as Anne Frank and died of typhoid four days before the liberation. His father was also captured and was shot as he tried to escape from a ‘death march’ to the Flossenburg camp.

“I am telling my story so that people did not die in vain,” said Mr Schachter, who has given 30 talks in the last year alone.

He concluded with a chilling statistic: “There were 3,000 people who perished in the Twin Towers disaster.

“In the Holocaust, on average, 3,000 Jews – men, women and children – died every single day of the week for five and a half years.

“The scale, the enormity of it, is unimaginable.”

Pupils from Greenhill were amongst those visiting Auschwitz last year.

Reports may be seen here and here.