LOS ANGELES – When I was told my multicultural journalism class was going to take a trip to the Museum of Tolerance and learn about the Holocaust, I was skeptical. I grew up in Israel. I know the Jewish story, beginning in the Old Testament and weaving its way through various history books. I know about the horrors of World War II and I know about bombs and violence. I’ve lived in bombs and violence. What could a museum teach me? I’ve seen it firsthand. I’ve lived it. Tell me something I don’t know. I dare you.

We arrived, passed through the “stringent” security (I go through more hassle just to get into the mall in Jerusalem), and met our guide, Eddie Ilan. I was prepared to be informed, but not touched.

You don’t want to believe it. You don’t want to believe the bespectacled 76-year-old man in front of you. You don’t want to believe there was ever a Warsaw Ghetto. You don’t want to believe that Jewish children were killed in the streets and the gas chambers, like animals. Most of all, you don’t want to believe somebody else’s story could hurt this much. But Eddie Ilan was one of those children.

Ilan was born in Poland and lived in a small town with his father, mother,and three sisters. As the German Empire stretched out its hand of darkness and grabbed a terrified Europe by the throat, he and his family were moved to the capital, to live among the half a million people crammed into the two-square kilometer ghetto. The refugees were forced to build their own cage: a wall built on a layer of garbage and iced with barbed wire. Within three months of working, Ilan’s father was dead. There was nothing to do in the Warsaw Ghetto except survive, and take walks. On one of these walks a Nazi soldier tore his sister’s baby from her arms and bashed it against a wall. The murder prompted Ilan to flee the ghetto, crawling through the garbage at the foot of the wall and walking the 51-kilometer trek home. He had nowhere else to go. He was 11 years old.

A Catholic priest took Ilan in, until Nazi orders dictated death to anyone who saved a Jew. Ilan ran away to save his friend, was caught, and was sent to a work camp.

“It was not a bad camp,” Ilan said practically. “They didn’t kill people, they only died.”

After being moved to another work camp, Ilan and 49 other inmates were loaded onto the overcrowded, lethal trains to be transferred. Thirty of them died within a week. The remaining 20 decided to jump at night, when there would be less chance of the Nazi guards on the roof of the car gunning them down. In the flurry of death and terror, only four of the 20 survived, one of them Ilan.

“I’ll never forget that,” Ilan said grimly, lifting up his pant leg to show the scar from where he was shot. The four made it to an all German village, where they pretended to be half German, half Polish. They told a story to the townspeople, one where they escaped from a Soviet train. “A story like this you never heard before,” Ilan said grinning. You could say the same thing about his life.

Several years later, Ilan had been to France, Italy, Austria and lands in Belgium. He convinced a group of Italian sailors to save him: He wants to go to the Jewish quarter in New York. Stowed away in a hatch with a jar of orange marmalade and no toilet, he arrived in New Jersey; 15, penniless and without a word of English. Luck brings him to New York, where he met his aunt in an office in a miraculous coincidence. She has a picture of him at 4 years old, the same picture now hanging on a wall in the Museum of Tolerance, along with the pictures of hundreds of other children. Among them, he is the only survivor.

Ilan eventually made his way to California. He learned English in 12 weeks and married at 17. He and his wife,Goldie, have a son, Jay, 55, and a daughter, Leah, 52. He has been working at the Museum of Tolerance for 10 years now. He relives the horror of the early years of his life, to educate and personalize the story of the Holocaust.

“I honest to God hope that the people that you are here, if I only reach one or two of you, I reach, I have done my job,” Ilan said earnestly, leaning slightly forward on his bench. “All I want to do is reach one or two kids. That’s all I want to do.”

Count me reached.