Holocaust survivor shares with Henderson students his tale of horror

The young Hungarian boy carved a horse head statue from sandstone with a pocket knife he snuck into the Nazi concentration camp.

He traded the statue to a German soldier for pencils so he could write in a journal he made from pieces of discarded cement paper bags.

“To everybody else’s knowledge, I was only drawing into the journal,” said Holocaust survivor Stephen “Pista” Nasser, now 85.

In 1944, at age 13, Nasser and 21 family members, including his older brother, were taken to concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Only he survived.

Over nearly 20 years, Nasser has shared his story with more than 200,000 people.

At Nevada State College in Henderson on Thursday, Nasser gave his 1,000th presentation. Nasser has given approximately 800 presentations in Nevada, in addition to speeches elsewhere in the Southwest and abroad in Hungary and Germany. Medical issues have kept the energetic Nasser from just one one lecture.

Speaking to about 60 students Thursday, Nasser challenged them to help others and to be skeptical of those who think history doesn’t repeat itself.

“Some of the Nazis were bullies,” said Nasser. “A lot of the terrorists today are bullies.”

It took Nasser more than 50 years to share his story publicly because of a painful memory he couldn’t bring himself to reveal to an uncle.

Upon returning to his childhood home in Hungary after being freed, he was reunited with an uncle who asked him what became of his wife and baby.

“I lied right into his face,” said Nasser. “I was an eyewitness, I was only a few feet away from my aunt and my little cousin when they both got massacred by Nazis.”

As Nasser recounted in painful detail how his aunt and baby cousin were killed, the audience became visibly shaken.

One student, Yesenia Sanchez, 21, said that hearing the emotion from a person who lived through something she had only read about affected her. “The emotion gets passed on to you,” she said.

After Nasser’s uncle died in 1996, he gave his first lecture in Pahrump in 1997.

Nasser retired in Las Vegas in the early 2000s after careers as a diamond setter, real estate agent and insurance agent. He estimated that about 100 other Holocaust survivors live in the valley today.

Nasser recently co-wrote a play about his experience called “Not Yet, Pista.”

Before his speech Thursday, Nasser pointed to a painting that depicts him holding a ladder for his brother who is climbing it to heaven. Nasser said he imagined himself telling his brother that he wants to join him, and his brother replying, “Not yet, Pista.”

Contact Alexander S. Corey at acorey@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0270. Find @acoreynews on Twitter.