On Wednesday, May 10, Palos Verdes Peninsula High School students witnessed what many call a "miracle." His name is Mel Tilles and he is a survivor of the Holocaust. When he decided to speak in the ninth and tenth grade history classes of  Jim Maechling and Adrienne Phillips, students had an opportunity to hear a first hand experience of what it was like to live in Nazi Poland and in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

Born in Poland, near Krakow, Tilles was around twelve years old when German troops occupied Poland. Tilles was happy at first with the occupation because he was banned from going to school. Once he was forced into the ghetto, however, conditions worsened. Indeed, one day while playing soccer with his friend, three Nazi soldiers took him to a fire station and pushed him off a tower four stories high. On that very same day soldiers rounded up all of the children in the ghetto, including Tilles’s three sisters, and took them via boxcars to Treblinka an extermination camp in Poland. Tilles was not taken to Treblinka because he was in the hospital.

Several months later, Tilles was brought to the German extermination camp Palchov. In only his early teens, Tilles was forced to clear fields of dead bodies and make tanks for the German troops (which is why, Tilles insists, the Germans lost the war).

Tilles eventually was transported to Dreisden, another Nazi camp. As a result of a series of Allied bombings on Dreisden, a piece of glass was lodged in Tilles’s eye.

As the Russians advanced on the German front, Tilles was moved to yet another camp, Threseindtadt, Hitler’s “showplace.” Taken by boxcars to Theresienstadt, Tilles was not given any water for three days. Upon arrival in April, Tilles went instantly to the health ward about the glass in his eye. (The piece of glass had been in his eye for three months, from February to April.) The doctors told Tilles that it was too late and his eye was taken out without antiseptics or anaesthesia. Several weeks later, Tilles was liberated from Threseintadt and he was reunited with his mother. He calls this event "the happiest moment of his life."

Tilles now resides in Los Angeles, California with his children and his Israeli wife. "Tilles just loves life," Mr. Maechling, a history teacher a Peninsula High School, said. "He does not feel hate towards the Nazis for what they did". Tilles is truly an inspiration -- a miracle of life that can defeat the odds.

Tille's sister Frieda who was taken to Treblinka	Mel as a young man - after life in the concentration camps
Mel with his mother and father after WWII	Tilles with Oscar Schindler