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In the U.S. Army, Dr. Leon Bass was denied the right to fight with white soldiers, eat at a restaurant in Beaumont, Texas, and drink from a public water fountain in Macon, Ga. But seeing a concentration camp gave Bass a whole new perspective on his struggles.

Before he liberated Buchenwald, Bass -- who spoke along with Abe Chapnick and Robbie Waisman, two of the Jews he freed, at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft May 12 -- felt that his country was telling him "Leon, you're not good enough to enjoy what you are fighting for." However, after what he called the "shock of my life," Bass learned that despite discrimination in the army, he still had something to fight for, and told himself: "Leon, all the pain and suffering did not happen to you alone."

"Now, I could see a bit more clearly," Bass said of his feelings after witnessing the horror of a concentration camp. "That tunnel vision I had dissipated."

Bass, Chapnick, and Waisman were the keynote speakers during the 29th Annual Colloquium of BCC's Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Education Center, relaying their message to middle and high school students at a packed Richard J. Collins Arena.

Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno told the students that by studying the Holocaust, they would learn to respond to everyday obstacles such as bullying, and that "there is never a wrong time to begin doing the right thing."

"You take those lessons from today and you use them in your everyday life to avoid what happened to us [over] 60 years ago," Guadagno said.

Bass called himself an "angry young black soldier" during World War II because he took an oath to protect the lives of his fellow soldiers, yet the armed forces were segregated.

"My country, our country, practiced and promoted institutional racism," Bass said.

When he was told his unit was going to liberate Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, Bass said he was surprised because "in all the training they had given me, no one ever mentioned concentration camp." Bass recalled how at Buchenwald, he saw body parts in formaldehyde to be used for experiments, the crematorium, clothing of dead children, and malnourished inmates he called "the walking dead."

"I couldn't read German. But I could see ... all of it was there," Bass said.

Although the experience at Buchenwald showed Bass how it was important that he served in the U.S. army, discrimination still followed him after the war. The G.I. Bill of Rights enabled Bass to enroll at West Chester State Teachers College in Pennsylvania, but he was told he couldn't live in a dorm or eat in a dining hall there because he was black, or as Bass put it, "Leon, you're still not good enough."

Bass's parents told him to persevere, explaining that once he got his education, nobody could take it away from him. At a movie theater, Bass also finally stood up for himself when an usher told him he could only sit in the balcony. Bass instead sat right in the middle of the theater, and nobody told him to move.

"I was telling [the usher], and everybody else, 'look, I'm good enough,'" Bass said.

Still, it wasn't Bass's last encounter with racism. When Bass attended a game at the Astrodome baseball stadium in Houston, on the day Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, King's death was flashed across the scoreboard and a number of white fans cheered. Bass said he took three months to get over what happened.

Bass went on to become an elementary school principal, and then a high school principal at Benjamin Franklin High School in Philadelphia. There, Bass had the task of changing the culture of one of the most troubled student bodies in town, he said. When black students wanted to change the name of the school to Malcolm X High School because Benjamin Franklin owned slaves, Bass told them Franklin was an abolitionist later in his life, and that it was important to "look at the whole person" before judging someone.

By trying to implement serious change at Franklin High, Bass said he risked losing his job, and told the students at Brookdale that they will face similar dilemmas in the future.

"Is the price too high to stand up for what you believe is right?" Bass asked.

"We have an awesome responsibility, we must keep the light shining," he concluded.

Waisman said when he met Bass after the war, they didn't speak the same language, so he "didn't have the words to tell him of my appreciation." Soldiers who liberated camps, he said, were surprised to find teenagers like himself and asked questions like "What was their crime?"

During the Holocaust, Jews at concentration camps were dehumanized, and "we responded, we became like animals" who did anything to survive, Waisman recalled. Then, he said "once survival came, we had to deal with the losses" and questions like "How do we cope? How do we learn to be human again?"

Another question Waisman asked himself was "What if?" when his sister-in-law Golda, who refused to work at a munitions factory because it meant being separated from her son Nathan, died with Nathan in the Treblinka concentration camp.

"What would Nathan have become?" Waisman said he asked himself.

"Multiply this by 1.5 million Jewish children who met the same fate," he said.

To ensure his survival, Waisman worked on a farm, and even though "the cows and I did not get along," he said he didn't know of anyone that survived in hiding with their parents after the ghetto he lived in was liquidated.

"So I guess I should be thankful to those cows," Waisman said.

Before Buchenwald, Waisman worked in a munitions factory. There, when his brother was sent off on a truck for an assignment, Waisman heard the crackling of machine guns from a distance, followed by the return of the truck with no passengers. That left Waisman with, yet again, painful questions.

"What was my brother's crime? Why did they kill him? An accident of birth," Waisman said. "He was born Jewish. And if you were Jewish during that time, you were simply condemned to die."

Upon Waisman's arrival at Buchenwald, he said "Abe [Chapnick] was with me. We didn't think we would have a chance to get out of this place alive."

Waisman said he shared his memories not to sadden the students, but to empower them.

"When you hear an ethnic joke, have the courage to say, very simply, 'it's not funny,'" Waisman said.

Chapnick began by asking the audience "Who am I?"

"I'm a Holocaust survivor," he answered. "What is my purpose to be here? To remind the world that all the bad things that happened to me should not happen again."

Chapnick said he was also there because of "the American army that put their lives on the line to liberate me."

Dale Daniels, executive director of the Holocaust and genocide center, said the program's speakers "demonstrate the best in us, a true triumph of the human spirit." Jane Denny, the center's director of education, said their lives "intersect at a pivotal moment in history as eyewitnesses to the final chapter of the Holocaust."