I am the daughter and oldest child of Ben and Jadzia Stern. My parents didn’t speak to me very much about the Holocaust, as this was obviously a horrible and traumatic time of their lives. But there were symptoms I saw and felt, and signs that I noticed that showed me that other families were different than my family. This is their story.
Tag:
Holocaust
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The impulse to create a memory and make it tangible is so very human — to hold it, and repeatedly commemorate it is also a very Jewish value … When we participate in remembrance, we help to avoid similar mistakes in the future.
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As more survivors are lost to us every year now, we so often look to art and culture to preserve first-hand accounts of remembrance, as humans have been doing for millennia. Films and the newer immersive “virtual reality” experiences both are key ways that survivors’ stories are shared today, but nothing compares to hearing from an old friend who says, “That’s my story too.”
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Hedda Kleinfeld Schachter was born in Austria to elegance, affluence, and education, and with her immediate family, was lucky to be among the few and fortunate able to escape Nazi-controlled Austria in the late-1930s. After her family landed in Brooklyn a few years later, she went on to become a brilliant fixture in New York bridal fashion, in particular — a trendsetter who made New York shoppers feel among the lucky and fortunate.
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Going to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is an important trip to make. The in-person experience is significant, profound, and unforgettable, and luckily for those not in the Washington D.C. area, the Museum website offers a rich remembrance as well.
