PLATTSBURGH -- Hermann Gruenwald can't change the past.

He can't bring back his father, Ignatz; his mother, Blanka, both victims of the Holocaust along with 6 million other Jews.

The Montreal man will never forget his eldest sister's first baby, a little girl who was coldly, deliberately murdered by the very doctor who had just moments before helped her into the world.

Gruenwald, 83, can no more erase the memories of the horrors he witnessed than he can scrub away the string of numbers on his left arm.

"But I can tell my story," the Montreal man told the students in the Plattsburgh High School auditorium.

A SINGLE STALK

Gruenwald was 18 when he and his family were transported from their little Hungarian village to Birkenau, the antechamber to Auschwitz, in 1944.

As his flesh was marred with the tattooist's ink, "I cried like a baby," he said. "To me, I became an animal."

The man who held the needle told him to stop crying and instead to consider his good fortune.

"People who didn't get the number ended up in the crematorium," Gruenwald said.

That was a lesson he built upon in the days to come: Sift through the horrific to find some hope.

Even when the harvesters move through a field of grain, he remembered, at least one stalk is left standing. Somehow, that image gave him strength.

"There's no explaining why one survived and one died in the camp," Gruenwald said.

At Auschwitz, he saw many die.

Luck gave him a privileged job in the kitchen, where he became an observer. The hangings took place within Gruenwald's sight there; he saw groups of women taken for human experimentation and then brought back, dead, on stretchers.