Holocaust survivor Marion Blumenthal Lazan speaks to Riverhead Middle School eighth-graders

As a girl in one of the Nazi concentration camps, Marion Blumenthal Lazan first thought the wagons being pulled through it were full of firewood for stoves.

She soon realized they were stacks of naked, dead bodies.

"Death was an everyday occurrence" in the Bergen-Belsen camp, she told several hundred eighth-graders at Riverhead Middle School on Thursday.

Lazan, 89, of Hewlett, is among the last survivors of the concentration camps. She gave an hourlong presentation to the students as part of a local program to address racism and bigotry — issues playing out both internationally and in Riverhead itself.

Tensions between Muslims and Jewish people over the Israel-Hamas war are intensifying as the conflict enters a third month.

Earlier this academic year, Riverhead saw at least two hate incidents: In September, two white high school students directed racial slurs at two young Black children at a football game, according to school officials. Later that month, officials found swastikas drawn on two desks inside a Riverhead High School classroom.

Joe Pesqueira, principal of the middle school, said the incidents partly prompted him to invite Lazan and made her appearance especially pertinent.

“Definitely we are always responsive to things that are happening in the community,” he said.

Lazan has told her story to more than 1 million people in 41 states and in five countries, according to event organizers. She is featured in a PBS documentary, “Marion’s Triumph."

Some 50,000 people died at the Bergen-Belsen camp in northern Germany, including Anne Frank, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

"Mine is a story that Anne Frank might have told, had she survived," Lazan said.

She said she didn’t think the first acts of antisemitism in Germany in the early 1930s would lead to much. She was very wrong.

Soon, Jewish people were outlawed from parks, pools, theaters and public schools, and were barred from associating with non-Jews.

The Holocaust began, in her opinion, on Nov. 9, 1938 — Kristallnacht, or "Night of Broken Glass," when Nazis smashed the windows of Jewish businesses and synagogues, and physical and verbal repression of Jews intensified.

Meanwhile, her family secured paperwork to immigrate to the United States and went to the Netherlands to wait. But before they could leave, the Nazis invaded. "We were trapped," she said.

They ended up in the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands and later were transferred to Bergen-Belsen.

It was a horror: 600 people crammed into an unheated wooden barracks designed for 100. Two people, usually strangers, assigned to each bunk. Toilets made of long, wooden benches with holes cut in them and no privacy. No toilet paper, soap or water to wash with regularly.

And constant deaths, many from starvation and typhus.

"Bodies could not be taken away fast enough," she said.

Some students said Thursday they were impressed by Lazan.

The talk “was heartfelt,” said Julianna Maldonado, 14. “She went through a lot and it’s hard for survivors to come out and speak about it.”