Scores of Tiverton High School students gathered in the school’s library one recent Friday morning to hear Alice Eichenbaum, 95, speak about her experiences in the holocaust. The assembly, which students enrolled in 11th grade history classes were invited to attend, was organized by the Sandra Bornstein Holocaust Education Center in Providence, an organization dedicated to teaching the history of the holocaust in order to memorialize its victims and reduce the prejudice that minorities of all kinds face as a result of ignorance. It was the second time she has spoken in Tiverton, following her first speech, which was prompted by a case of anti-semitism there last year.

The center’s guiding belief is one that Alice seems to hold dear: Only through education is there hope.

Eichenbaum, who was born in Vienna but spent most of her youth in Sofia, Bulgaria, revealed how she watched her world slowly descend into war and tragedy.

“We had no idea what was going on,” she recalls of the time surrounding the annexation of Austria in 1938, which was Nazi Germany’s first act of territorial aggression.

“I was always a happy-go-lucky child. But by 1939, 1940, we knew something very wrong was happening. That’s when my life started to change.”

Eichenbaum was kicked out of her school in Sofia and eventually transported with her family to Turkey, where they lived in an abandoned school amongst hundreds of other Jewish families. It was here that Alice recalled how she slept on straw mattresses and often went to bed hungry. It wasn’t until September 1944 that the Russian army freed them, not a moment too soon.

“I know that if the Russian army hadn’t come in at that time, we would have been gone on transport [to a concentration camp],” Alice told the students.

Despite the two years of fear and uncertainty she endured, Alice considers herself extremely lucky. Her late husband, Raymond Eichenbaum, was not as fortunate. “Everything changed overnight for him. As slow as it went for me in Bulgaria, things for [my husband] changed rapidly.”

Raymond, who was born and raised in Poland, was a survivor of Auschwitz. Before his death in 1993, he also spoke publicly, reaching out to thousands of people with his story. Alice remembered when he used to speak in front of groups of students just like those in Tiverton, and that “he couldn’t sleep the day before and he couldn’t sleep the day after. The memories came back to him. He always said how he will never forget the screams of people and the smoke of the furnace.”

Eichenbaum’s words sparked curiosity in the Tiverton students –– many were eager to ask questions about the more minute details of her life and childhood. “You could hear a pin drop,” Wendy Joering, the executive director of the Education Center, said. “Some of the kids were tearing up. They were an attentive audience.”

After Tiverton’s Atlantic Sports Bar and Restaurant made national headlines last year for posting an anti-semitic Facebook post, the Education Center has been invited to hold various meetings and speeches around the town and its surrounding areas to raise public awareness of implicit bias and how anti-semitism manifests itself in the present day.

In 2016, Rhode Island signed a bill that required Holocaust and genocide education in high schools. Alice Eichenbaum said it was because of deniers and bigots that Raymond felt the need to tell his story, and the reason she continues his mission.

“It’s a big part of this life,” she said. “It changed everything.”

For more about Alice’s story and the Sandra Bornstein Education Center, see www.bornsteinholocaustcenter.org.