HAMMOND | More than half a dozen immigrants or family members of immigrants attended the Purdue University Calumet - Hammond High School Oral History Project.

This is the first year the event was held at the high school, said PUC education supervisor Norma Coleman who was at the school working with students and overseeing the project. Prior to that, the project had been in Gary schools four years, she said.

The program was established by LaVada Brandon, a history professor at Purdue, to help students learn more about history by talking to people who experienced it firsthand, Coleman said.

Four Hammond High teachers were involved in the project along with eight classes.

Junior Chris Jackson, 16, was in a group of students interviewing Judith Bornstein Upton, of Chesterton and formerly of Gary. Upton brought along photo albums focusing on her grandparents.

Upton's maternal grandparents were forced out of Nazi German in 1938 arriving in the United States two years later. Her paternal grandfather left Russia in the late 1890s and arrived first in Chicago, then in Gary in 1904 as it was becoming a town.

Jackson said he learned from Upton how difficult it was for people to travel in those days. "I thought they just got on a plane," he said. "She told us they had to take a test to become a citizen and it took several years. She also talked about the dangers of coming by boat."

Katherine Flotz, of Crown Point, talked to students about her book "A Pebble in My Shoe." She and her sister lost their parents and their freedom, spending three years in a concentration camp, guarded by communist partisans of Marshall Tito. She told students the camp was located in their town of Gakowa, one of seven in Yugoslavia where ethnic Germans were incarcerated because they were enemies of the state.

Julie Santos, of Chicago, with the League of United Latin American Citizens, led a discussion with students about her advocacy efforts on behalf of Latin Americans.