Kurt & Tessye Simon Fund for Holocaust Remenbrance Survivor's Stories  
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Survivor Stories

Individual Survivor & Liberator Stories
 

 

 
 

A Story of Holocaust Survival

Preserved here are the stories of twenty-three of our own neighbors who moved to the South Bend area, but had lived in Europe during the Nazi period of the 1930’s and 1940’s.

They are people who may have been your neighbors, friends or co-workers of your families. Though each had a unique path that brought them here, all of them survived the Holocaust. They were bound together by loss and deprivation, tragedy and crisis, brutality and torture in a way few of us can actually comprehend.

This documentary was undertaken by the Kurt and Tessye Simon Fund for Holocaust Remembrance of Temple Beth-El. Our goal was to preserve their testimonies with first hand personal accounts, the oral histories, of survivors and liberators, with the hope that the public re-telling of these stories would be a compelling and inspiring educational resource for the public at large.

These survivors lost everything – their families, their homes, their personal property, their money and their way of life. It was very difficult for them to tell their stories. The lesson of their accounts bears stating – that hatred and prejudice can ultimately lead to genocide, and that we need to think and act so as to prevent similar events from ever occurring again.

 
© Kurt & Tessye Simon Foundation for Holocaust Remembrance