Featured Stories

Thea was an amazing woman who consistently lived a double life to survive turbulent times. She grew up as an upscale Jewish girl living in an apartment with her mom, dad, and sister in Berlin, Germany. As a Jew, she experienced antisemitism from her friends and neighbors. When she was young, she was an exchange student in France and spoke fluent French and German. At 23 years old, she got married in summer of 1938 and soon escaped to France. She assumed a fake identity and kept her German and Jewish identity a secret. She passed information to the French Resistance she learned working around the occupying German forces without them knowing she understood them. She also gave birth to two sons and then hid them in a Catholic “school” (orphanage), secretly visiting them about every other week. After the war ended, she was eventually sponsored to come to the United States along with her two young sons where they lived together in a meager apartment with her sister and parents who had escaped to Shanghai after losing everything they had in Germany. Thea loved her family and showed affection only to them.

Audience: Middle School, High School, Adults

Format: PowerPoint and Lecture

Eva Selymes was born in Hungary and raised in a close-knit Jewish family. She was just twenty years old when the Nazis occupied Hungary in 1944 and deported her family to Auschwitz. Through a combination of luck and extraordinary courage, she managed to reunite with her sisters in Auschwitz. The four sisters stayed together and survived months of starvation, forced labor, and brutality across multiple concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Stutthof, and labor camps in Poland. Eva endured death marches, beatings, and constant fear, sustained by courage, faith, and the strength of her family bond. After liberation, she returned to Hungary, where she learned that most of her family—including her parents and three younger brothers—had been murdered.  Eva married a childhood friend who had also survived and began her life anew.

Audience: Middle School, High School, Adults

Format: PowerPoint and Lecture

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Lotti Melzer's childhood ended on the morning of her 14th birthday, when she and her family awoke to the thunder of invading German warplanes over her home in Amsterdam.  Lotti’s parents and little brother were put on trains to death camps, but Lotti was sent to work in the Philips electronics factory in the Vught concentration camp.  Lotti and the other Philips workers were saved from the gas chambers thanks to the intervention of their employer, who protected them by arguing that their work making electronics for the German army was vital to the war effort.  Nevertheless, Lotti endured horrific living conditions and harsh treatment as she spent the last of her teenage years working in factories within different concentration camps.

Audience: Middle School, High School, Adults

Format: PowerPoint and Lecture

My father was born January 4, 1939 in Germany. He, his brother and mother miraculously survived three camps, two ghettos and one prison over a period of three and a half years. Their's is truly a story of bravery, resilience and maybe divine intervention. As a child of a child survivor, I have pieced together this amazing story of survival.

Audience: Middle School, High School, Adults

Format: PowerPoint and Lecture

Zaidy grew up with religious parents in the Jewish section of Munkacs. When he was a teenager, the Hungarians took over that land (in 1938). He spent his young adulthood working, and then hiding in Budapest when the war arrived in Hungary. He was sent to a work camp but escaped. After the war he reunited with his 3 sisters but his parents had died. He raised my mom in communist Czechoslovakia and the family immigrated to the US in 1964.

Audience: Middle School, High School, Adults

Format: PowerPoint and Lecture

Lottie Freund was born in 1923 in Berlin, Germany, the youngest of two daughters. They lived comfortably until Hitler came to power. She and her family were lucky enough to get passageway on the MS St Louis when she was sixteen years old and escape Germany's rising antisemitism. 

Audience: Middle School, High School, Adults

Format: PowerPoint and Lecture