A sign above the door in Whitehorse 105 reads "Maximum Occupancy 85" but whoever set up for the Holocaust Survivor Forum must have known better.

The 108 chairs set out were not enough to seat all of the students and community members who came to the forum. Those without a seat stood instead. The speaker, Susie Sherman, appeared petite in stature, but the gravity of what she had to say is what drew such a crowd to Everett Community College last Wednesday.

Sherman's story began in Czechoslovakia, where her family established in the 1700s. She explained that Czechoslovakia was a place where "if you worked hard, you could do well," and her family had done just that.

They owned an automobile garage and a general store in town, and "thought they were safe and, most importantly, assimilated" within their community of Jews and non-Jews in Czechoslovakia.

"They thought this was their home," said Sherman of her relatives.

In 1938, Germany's leaders, including Hitler, met in Munich with their European allies who asked for "peace in [their] time" in the aftermath of WWI. Hitler agreed to this, were he to get the western-third of Czechoslovakia-Sudetenland-where Sherman and her family lived. However, soon, he would want much more than that.

Sherman describes her family's survival as a miraculous case of recurring luck. When the Nazis marched into their town, her parents Emmy and Rudi Rindler fled with only Susie, her older sister, and the jewelry sewn into their mother's coat.

Through multiple narrow-escapes with the Nazis, the Rindlers fled from Sudetenland to Prague to Holland to England, finally arriving in America thanks to an old friend who sponsored them.

The four Rindlers were safe, but all of their relatives, except for one uncle, died in concentration camps.

One woman in attendance brought her school-aged son along. This being their sixth lecture, she said the first-hand accounts are something "the history books never talk about.It gives a whole new perspective on the war and what the people went through." These stories are what she brings her son to hear.

Sherman hopes, on a global level, that through her story others realize that they "have the power.to work towards a world where all are treated with the respect each of us deserves." .a world that will not allow another Holocaust to happen.

Susie Sherman's presentation was the second in a series of four. The next two will be Wednesdays May 13 and 27, both at noon in Whitehorse 105.