MANKATO — Holocaust survivors continue to speak to public groups for the most elementary of reasons: to do what they can to ensure against history repeating itself.

Twin Cities residents Margot DeWilde and Murray Brandys spoke at Minnesota State University Friday about their personal hells and proffered some worldly perspective to college students.

“I’m very grateful to live in this country,” Polish-born Jew Brandys told them, his voice breaking.

“Don’t kid yourself. Everyone who lives in this country should be grateful.”

German-born Jew DeWilde spent three years in Nazi concentration camps and was sterilized as a test subject for Dr. Josef Mengele’s infamous medical experiments.

Brandys spent five years in six camps before making a long, forced death march with 2,000 other prisoners as the war wound down.

Though any attempt to capture their nightmare existence in a few paragraphs is folly, here is an overview of their stories:

DeWilde and members of her family arrived by cattle car to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Mengele stood on a depot platform and selected who would live and who would not.

DeWilde’s head was shaved, and she entered a barracks with signage sardonically reading “Work Will Make You Free,” and received a tattoo on her arm.

“47574,” she said. “We became numbers from then on. You didn’t know what was going to happen from minute to minute.”

She ended up in a barracks for women used in medical experiments. One day, doctors injected her vagina with a fluid. To this day, she doesn’t know what it was.

She said the sterilization didn’t hurt, and is grateful — if that’s the right word — that she wasn’t among those chosen for far more brutal experimentation.

Perhaps her most gratifying moment came when she and other prisoners were being transported by train to a work site.

They dumped a toilet bucket from the boxcar, its contents striking a German soldier walking below.

“It made our day,” she said.

She recalls when the camp she was in at war’s end was liberated by allied troops.

“We saw a prisoner walking along with an American flag and thought we were hallucinating.”

Brandys’ story is fraught with terror.

He was 14 when Germany invaded Poland, arriving in his town and summarily hanging several prominent local Jews in public.

“The reason they did that is to instill fear into every person,” he said.

He eventually was sent to a concentration camp, then to another and another.

He was a strong young man and the Germans had plenty of hard labor for him, including building houses for Germans who had been bombed out of their homes.

At one camp, rations consisted of little more than grass. Prisoners who became too weak to work were killed.

At another camp, inmates who couldn’t meet their work quotas were starved, whipped and made to stand for hours in the cold.

For many, suicide was a relief. Each morning, he said, bodies would be lying at the base of electrified fences.

Prisoners killed each other over their food rations and, he said, some turned to cannibalism.

“But I was not part of that. I was still young, I still had strength, and I told myself that I was going to outlive them.”

In 1945, as American troops drew near, he and his campmates were forced to walk four weeks through the woods, toting the personal belongings of German soldiers and officers taking flight.

He said he saved his own life one day when, as a last resort, he broke into a Yiddish song as he was being taken away to be killed.

A German officer heard him singing and ordered that Brandys be freed. He said he doesn’t know why.

When Brandys was liberated, he had typhoid fever, lice-infested flesh and weighed about 80 pounds.

The Friday talks were sponsored by several MSU academic departments and the Kessel Peace Institute.