Our Federation has long received requests for interviews with Child Survivors (including Hidden Children and Kindertransport Children). Holocaust education, the creation of Speakers’ Bureaus, and the telling of our stories, are part of our reason for being as an organization. We are able to have students and other interested parties contact and interview Child Survivors directly. The segments of stories you are reading on this page are only part of the larger stories but they give you an idea of who this Child Survivor is. At this stage, for reasons of privacy, the identity of the survivor is anonymous, only known by the first name of the survivor.
If you wish to contact the survivor in person, please email us with some information about yourself, who you are, where you come from, the purpose of the interview, how it will be used, etc.
- The World Federation at Liberation 75
Liberation75 has launched their library of events held as part of the virtual conference May 4-9, 2021 and you can watch the World Federation session here.
- Michael Berenbaum “Making Sense of This Moment in Time”
In the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants’ first virtual event, Michael Berenbaum speaks on current events to World Federation members on January 17, 2021.
This event may now be viewed online here
- Listen to Max Lezer’s interview for the Claims Conference campaign
Our Max Lezer’s comments were posted for you to view.
- Stephan Ross, a death camps survivor and founder of the New England Holocaust Memorial, dies
Stephan Ross invoked images beyond nightmares when he spoke of his imprisonment as a boy in Nazi labor and death camps – 10 in all. He survived brutal beatings and ravaging illnesses and dashed away when told to wait in a line of those chosen to die.
“The history of my childhood is beyond what you ...
- 2019 WFJCSH&D Conference Vancouver, November 1-4 Robert Krell Keynote
The Future of Our Past: Informing and Inspiring the Next Generations
Keynote for 31st Gathering of WFJCSH&D
Vancouver, B.C. Canada November 2, 2019
Dear friends,
Look around you. Embrace what you see. Already you are sharing a miracle. For how is it possible that we are here? Think of it. We were not meant to be. Survivors are exactly ...
- New Book by Child Survivor Philipp Sonntag
How do “Child Survivors Germany” cope with antisemitism and other challenges, since 1945 and even beyond 2020? There is a new book available in English language:
Philipp Sonntag: Forever Alert – German Child Survivors in Action Before 1945 and Beyond 2019. Beggerow Verlag, Berlin, October 2019; 240 pages.
This book is Volume V of the Book Series: ...
- Holocaust Memory, Preservation, Transmission
When “the last witnesses” are gone, the last survivors and child survivors are gone…. who will bear witness in the museums, who will speak to the visitors and to the students, who will go into the schools, who will do the personal interviews for school projects… who will remind the world what occurred so long ...
- New website and exhibit on Lost Childhood
Jewish Child Survivors, Lost Childhood
A new website from the Claims Conference, German Office.
www.JewishChildSurvivors.org
You can contact them to share your story. There is an exhibition to be shown in Frankfurt at the ZWST conference and in London at the conference of the Kindertransport children.
Claims Conference, Office for Germany
Sophienstraße 26 – D -60487 Frankfurt am Main
Tel.: +49-69-970708-32 ...
- Lodz Ghetto Commemoration
70th Commemoration of the Liquidation of the Litzmannstadt (Lodz) Ghetto
Click here to read an article by Dr. Charles Silow, 2G from Detroit on Charley’s visit to his family home in Lodz, Poland.
Also photos by Dr. Charles Silow.
- Book: Our Memories 2012
We are pleased to be able to share R. Gabriele Silten’s book, Our Memories 2012. Our Memories is a book of poems, memoirs, and other documents submitted by child survivors and their families for the 2012 Cleveland Conference. Gabriele has announced that this will be the last memory book.
You can access Our Memories 2012 in ...
- Steve T.
MORE FROM A WANDERER
I was born in Vienna, Austria on January 8, 1932. I was thus six years old at the time of the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Germany).
We left Vienna on an overnight train to Venice from Sudbahnhof (South Station) at 10 P.M. on September 8, 1938. We continued on to Milan. Once ...
- Marcelle B.
My parents were originally from a small town near the larger city of Lodz, in Poland. They came to live in Paris right after their marriage in 1930, and I was born there in August of 1931. Ours was a large family. My mother and father were cousins and each had six brothers and ...
- Ilana D.
My parents were born in Germany and fled after Hitler’s rise. Many of the members of their extended family managed to reach safe havens between 1933 and 1939 when the war actually started. This was the pattern of a great part of German Jewry. Thus I have cousins in South Africa, in Australia, in England, ...
- Helen B.
I am a child survivor of the Holocaust. Even though I am no longer a child at this time, I was a child when I lived through the Holocaust.
Before the war, I lived in Brussels, Belgium with my family. I enjoyed a culturally rich orthodox Jewish family life. We were poor but never hungry and ...
- Floris K.
In July 1942, I was eight years old and living in occupied Belgium. The Germans had just begun to round up Jews and deport them so it became imperative for my family to go into hiding.
Suddenly I found myself in a strange place away from home, away from Mum and Dad. I say “suddenly” because ...
- Miryam L.
A TALE OF TEREZIN (also known as Theresienstadt)
Interview with My Mother, Miryam L., Child Survivor of Concentration Camp
As Told To Esther V. L., 1999
SOME BACKGROUND NOTES:
The place of my mother’s Birth, CHUST, is a small town in the province of galicia, in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains. The Romanian border was about 20 kilometers ...
- Rudolph J.
S.S. St. Louis experience
I was born on May 11, 1933. After the promulgation of the Nurnberg laws in 1935, my parents decided there was no future for them or their in children in Nazi Germany and applied for a U.S. immigration quota number. It would be four years before this number would come up. In ...
- Goldie S.
Goldie survived the Auschwitz camp.
Some questions and answers:
#1 How long did you stay in Auschwitz?
Five and 1/2 months. Went in with my mother and 2 sisters, was 13 1/2 years old when war ended.
#2 What was your daily schelude? Did it vary from day to day?
Because I was so young and my mother was weak ...
- Richard V.
I was born in Warsaw Poland and I lived there until 1939. In that year, after Germans occupied Poland, my parents and I managed to get across the border to the eastern part of Poland that was occupied by Russia. Due to various government restrictions we managed to finish up in a little village called ...
- Gerda S.
I was born in Przemysl, Poland, but after the Russians occupied Eastern Poland, we moved in to Lwow, to avoid being sent to camps in Russia. My father was a business man and was considered “an enemy of the state”.
The Germans occupied our area in June of 1941 and we were forced into a ghetto ...
- Malka B.
My parents were originally from a small town near the larger city of Lodz, in Poland. They came to live in Paris right after their marriage in 1930, and I was born there in August of 1931. Ours was a large family. My mother and father were cousins and each had six brothers and sisters. ...
- Rene G.
I was born in Luxembourg, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, 25 March 1934. My parents had immigrated from Western Poland. In 1940, after the German invasion of the Benelux countries, we moved to Brussels, where I began my primary education, in Flemish. But as insecurity grew, we fled in August 1942 to the Unoccupied Zone of ...
- Henry O.
Henry O
I was born in Amsterdam in April, 1940, a month before the German invasion of the Netherlands (10th May 1940). My father was born in Krakow, now Poland. He had moved to Vienna , Austria, at the age of 14. He moved to Amsterdam in 1925 where he joined some of his brothers.
My mother ...
- Aaron E.
Aaron E.
Aaron lives in Chicago, Illinois, USA
Good Afternoon, Honorable Mayor, (Mrs. Daley,) Distinguished guests, Fellow Survivors (by whose presence I am truly humbled), Students, Ladies and Gentleman
The questions ladies and gentlemen is why do we speak about the holocaust? Why do I speak?
I speak because I can still be heard. Our voices are being extinguished ...
