It was a sobering, overcast morning for 1,000-plus middle- and high-school students on Holocaust Remembrance Day, as a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp shared with students his formidable years in several camps and ghettos in his native Poland.

David Lenga, a Woodland Hills resident, told his story at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley about the year he turned 11, and World War II broke out.

He told the audience on Monday how German soldiers invaded his village, held Jews captive and transported them in freight cars to concentration, extermination and labor camps throughout occupied Poland during WWII.

The 95-year-old spent six years underfed, starving and forced into hard labor. He was uncertain of what would happen next in the death camps and ghettos, surrounded in barbed wire and watch towers filled with armed soldiers — and German Shepherds ready to rip captives apart.

It’s been 84 years since Nazi leaders unleashed violence on the Jewish people, attacking them in their homes, burning synagogues and shattering 7,500 plus Jewish-owned commercial establishments.

Of Lenga’s 100 extended family members, only he and his father survived.

Yet years later, despite his sense of fear and his suicidal thoughts at times, he explained that while he was freed by American soldiers at a farmhouse in Germany, he alone had to define what that freedom meant.

“I didn’t know what freedom meant at that point or what to do with it, what my future would be,” Lenga said. “I was all alone. I was not going to let the darkest time of my life affect my future. I wouldn’t let it destroy me, because that would let Hitler win. “

Eric Adler, an eighth-grade English teacher at Valley View Middle School in Simi Valley, brought his class to hear Lenga talk about his harrowing survival.

“We have had Holocaust survivors come to the school in the past, but they are starting to pass, so (today) is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Adler said. “And it’s personal for me; my mother’s entire family was murdered during the Holocaust.”

Adler said his class is reading several books related to the Holocaust, including, “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” but they are secondary. “Here’s a person who actually was there,” he said.

Austin Rose, a 13-year-old in Adler’s class, said he was surprised by some of what he heard, and upon reflection after Lenga’s account he said, “There’s a lot to think about, and it has changed the way I think about the world.”

His classmate, Angelica Dialogo, 14, said it was hard to hear how cruel people can be to other human beings, lacking all pity for them.

“It was shocking to hear how people accepted the fact they were killing these people because they were different,” Angelica said.

Some of the students on Monday also took a tour of the museum’s latest special exhibit, “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away,” at the Ronald Reagan Library and Museum.

Hundreds of personal items such as suitcases, eyeglasses and shoes that belonged to Auschwitz deportees are on display, along with concrete posts from a fence at the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, fragments of original prisoners’ barrack from the Auschwitz III-Monowitz Camp, and a desk and other possessions of the first and longest-serving Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss.

The Auschwitz exhibition portrays the dark reality of the notorious camp, which remains a universal symbol of Nazi horror, and causes its viewers to see how its role has determined worldviews and strengthened the responsibility to keep such evil from ever resurfacing, according to museum officials.

Matthew Jarecki, 14, an eighth-grader at Valley View Middle School, said seeing the striped uniforms imprinted with numbers to identify the Jews in the camps stood out to him.

“I was thinking about the movie I saw, called ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas’,” he said. “It made me realize how important it is to learn about the Holocaust.”

Seeing a model of Auschwitz in the exhibit also helped him understand how many people were impacted. “How hard of a life they had there,” he said.