 Welcome to the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. My name is Angie Grove. I'm the executive director here, and that is Tom Sharpley. He's our museum manager, and he moved all the furniture for you, as well as got the snacks out and everything. So yay, Tom. Yes. Okay. So today we are here for our July 2023 installment of our monthly lecture series. Our monthly lecture series is a free community enrichment program that covers a variety of topics that are related to either the history of Vermont or early American history or somehow to the site that we're on here at the Homestead. And we have a variety of speakers in this series, and I'd like to start by thanking our sponsors for our 2023 season of our community enrichment program. So our local sponsors are North Country Federal Credit Union, M&T Bank, and Vermont AARP. So if you see any of those organizations out in the community, make sure you thank them for sponsoring these programs. Okay. So today we are partnering with the Vermont Holocaust Memorial. So a little background as to how that partnership started. I attended a conference in December for Vermont history teachers, and my table was very close to the table for the Vermont Holocaust Memorial. So I was learning for the first time about this amazing organization, and I found out that they are kind of a roving organization. They don't have a brick and mortar place, so I was asking how did they get their word out? How do they teach people and do outreach? And she said that, I was speaking with the president, Deborah, of the organization, and she said that they mostly work in schools and teach K through 12 educational programs. And I said, well, what about adults? And we have this amazing community enrichment series that reaches mostly an adult audience, though we do put this out on YouTube, so there are some youths out there who watch this too. And so I invited the Vermont Holocaust Memorial to come and give one of our community enrichment presentations. So today we have two people from the Vermont Holocaust Memorial here to speak, and I'm going to introduce the first of those two speakers. You can already see her up on the screen due to the flood warnings of today. She is joining us via Zoom, and also we are very lucky that we have a partnership with CCTV or town meeting TV, and they have helped get us the technology to have hybrid programming, and that's also who's in the back, that's Bella from CCTV who's recording this program. So thank you to Bella and CCTV also. So Miriam Rosenblum is the face on the screen before you hear. Miriam lives in Hyde Park, Vermont, and she spends the winter in Florida. She is the daughter of Holocaust survivors from the Netherlands. She grew up in Montreal and is the vice president and co-founder of the Vermont Holocaust Memorial, which is a virtual nonprofit whose mission is Holocaust education in Vermont. Miriam is an active member of Vermont Holocaust Memorial's speakers bureau presenting the lessons from her family's story of survival through the Holocaust to students and communities throughout the state. So I am now going to hand the stage over virtually to Miriam here. Thank you so much, Angie, and I wanna apologize to all of you. I had every intention of being there today, excuse me, but with all the warnings and announcements not to travel on these roads and we have a road closing, I chose not to make that trip. So I hope you understand, but thank goodness for technology. And thank you to the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum for inviting us today. It's an honor and a privilege to talk to all of you, although your screen is frozen. But you can see me, so that's good. Yes, I am one of the co-founders of the Holocaust, of Vermont Holocaust Memorial. We began this organization in 2017. It actually was not intended to be what we are today. We had started off by during Yom HaShowa, which is a Holocaust remembrance day in April. We decided to feature nine Vermont residents and their Holocaust stories. Either they were survivors or their parents were survivors. These were second generation who we interviewed and told the story of what happened to their families. We gathered pictures and we made storyboards. We had nine of them and we mounted them and we presented them at the Jewish community of Greater Stowe, Jay Coggs in Stowe. And our intention was to have it there for maybe a week or so and take it down and pack it up and put it away. What happened was there was a lot of interest. Church groups came, other faith organizations came, people from our community came, and then we found school groups were coming. And before we knew it, we realized that we had something here, that there was no place where people could learn about the Holocaust. There was no outreach for Holocaust education in the state of Vermont. And so Vermont Holocaust Memorial was born. We were three second generation women from different parts of the state. And we decided it was our mandate now to teach Holocaust in the state of Vermont. We are a 501c3, we are a non-profit and the only way we survive is through grants and through donations. And we're strictly volunteer organization. We have a small board and we're always looking to add new people who have expertise in certain areas. So our vision and mission are such that our mission is the Vermont Holocaust Memorial is committed to teaching the lessons of the Holocaust by honoring lives lost and sharing stories of survival. And our vision is there are invaluable lessons to be learned by studying the Holocaust, by engaging and educating the community. We envision a time when prejudice, bigotry and hatred will be replaced or respect for all. So we see Holocaust education showing the backdrop of what happened in Europe not so long ago, not so far away. What could happen if things get unchecked? The Jews were targeted, other groups were targeted but easily it could happen if we're not careful. And so we felt that Holocaust education was critically important. As Angie pointed out, we are a museum without walls. We are a virtual museum. Often we get requests to house people's artifacts and things. We have no facility, but we direct them in where that could happen. So what do we offer? What are we doing? For one, we have a speakers bureau. We are a number of children of survivors. We come from different countries. My family from the Netherlands. We have the Czech Republic and Hungary and Poland and various countries. And we go into the community. We go to schools, we go to community centers, we go to special interest groups all over the community. This year alone, we have 34 engagements in schools and other centers. So often teachers will approach us and say they're looking for, they're studying this week about the Holocaust, could we come and address their group? And we're more than happy to do that either physically or virtually, whatever we can do. We also have a mobile exhibit. Out of those nine panels that we made back in 2017, we have selected a few. We've enhanced them, made them better, more presentable. And we have them in a mobile exhibit. In addition to that mobile exhibit, we have some panels that sort of give the foundation of how and when the war began, how did it culminate to the beginning of the war and thus the Holocaust. And this mobile exhibit, we've shown at Lost Nation a number of times when the presentation of becoming Dr. Ruth was there. She had a Holocaust past, cabaret. We've been at the State House. We've been at the Social Studies Convention in Burlington for teachers. And our exhibit is easily mobile and can be presented in other churches, libraries, whomever would like to have it. No charge, of course. And we're happy to bring it to you. In addition, we have an annual Educator Professional Development Workshops. We've done that now three years in a row, once in Stowe, once in Burlington, once in Woodstock. This year, we don't know where it's going to be yet, but each year we bring teachers to this workshop, anywhere from 25 to 40 teachers have attended at any one time. And we have a topic such as the dangers of propaganda or media, topics about anti-Semitism. Each year we have a focus of what the main topic will be and we have a facilitator from Echoes in Reflection. They are a group, a part of ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, and they will come, they're professionals, they know how to teach teachers and how to get the material that teachers need in the classroom to address those topics. And the Echoes in Reflection will give resources and lesson plans to these teachers. So reaching this many teachers 40 at a time, we feel exponentially we are reaching the students of Vermont in a very profound way. We also started something we call the LEAF Project. Now, what we're trying to do is collect a million and a half leaves. That is, we are providing a leaf in a piece of paper or whatever format you want on a colored piece of paper. Wherever we speak, and this is something that you can do after the talk today, write a message, give a thought, whatever you wanna put on your leaf. And our idea is to collect a million and a half leaves. That is to represent the million and a half children who perished during the Holocaust. Why a leaf? Why are we even doing that? We feel that when we talk in these huge numbers, we have no idea of the magnitude that that number actually is six million, a million and a half, it's unsavenable. And so we wanted to visually have a mechanism to do that and we chose the LEAF given that we live in Vermont and you can't look out a window where you don't see a tree or a leaf. And also that the tree is a symbol of life. It grows, it has roots like a family. Each leaf is different than the other, such as people are. And so we thought the symbol of the LEAF was very powerful. To date, we have collected 2,751 leaves. So we have a long way to go, but we understand that. We may never reach that number, which is understandable. It's such a big number. And whenever we go to schools or groups like yourselves, we ask people make a LEAF and we will put it in our collection. And we hope one day to do an art installation of these leaves in order to show it to the community. And we've had many, many groups participate in that. This year, in addition to all the other things we've been doing, we had a student contest and we've done this a few years in a row. Grades four through 12. And we asked them to do a poem, to do a poster, to write an essay, whatever medium they can express themselves in. Last year or two years ago during COVID, we wanted them to do a present, to write an essay or a poster or a poem about rescuers, rescuers in their community, ordinary people doing extraordinary things as it related to their community and their life. And as well, what happened during the Holocaust? Because we saw that happen and that's the only reason I'm here today is because people saved my parents. And so this year we did a contest as well and that was why is it important to learn about the Holocaust. And we got over 30 entries from different parts of the state, from different schools. We got homeschoolers and the students were given a cash award for each category for first, second and third prize and we gave a $50 award to the teacher from the school that submitted so that they could purchase hopefully Holocaust material for their classrooms. In addition, we've done over 45 media spots this year through NPR, through VPR, through the newspaper, through the radio. And generally they are in response to an anti-Semitic event that's happened or maybe a commemoration of some kind in the community for Holocaust Remembrance Day. And it's very powerful to be out there in our community, Debbie Steinerman, our president is a maven at the media. And through that we have received many responses from people around Vermont who have seen us and want to participate in our organization and help us. And that is very, very important. In addition, this year we also had something we call the Vermont Holocaust Education Week. And that was in response to a resolution that the government of Vermont made to make Remembrance Day, to pass a resolution to make International Holocaust Remembrance Day official in the state of Vermont. That happened for January 27th. I have the resolution if anybody wants to read it. But out of that came a desire through the agency of education to have a education week, which we did from January 23rd to 27th. And in that we had speakers such as myself, other second generation from Vermont and from around the country give daily talks to the students that the teachers could tap into. We gave them lesson plans and resource material. And we know that we had something like 1,275 registered eyes. That is a classroom with students who viewed the speakers. And it's all available on YouTube as well. And so in that way we were able to reach the whole state. And we hope to make that an annual event. This year we might push it to April so that we would give the teachers after the teacher conference, after the teacher workshop, time to teach them more background before they tap into the education week. I spoke at a school virtually during COVID at Mount Abram High School in Bristol. And out of that came something very interesting. Two eighth grade students at the time decided that they felt Holocaust education should happen in the state of Vermont. And so they started a petition. And this petition stated, let's help make Holocaust education required in all Vermont public secondary schools. And this petition is available online through our website. And we asked you to tap in, sign up and make your voices heard so that we could make that happen. To date we have over 900 concerned citizens and students who have signed that petition. So it's remarkable that the students felt that that was important enough to initiate that. So our organization is strong about advocating Holocaust education legislation in our public schools. And last year is, hello? And last year, 21-22, there was a bill that was presented that called for research into the status of Holocaust education in the state. It was backed by Senator Becca Baylent as well as three House representatives and 15 other Senate sponsors. But we felt due to the cost and we didn't feel it was necessary to do research to see if Holocaust education was necessary in the state. We just didn't feel the research was necessary. That bill did not move forward. In 2022, the claims conference, which is the conference on Jewish material claims against Germany, did a survey of 50 states and on Holocaust knowledge of American millennials and Gen Z. And they had shocking results. A substantial number of millennials and Gen Z, including 42% of Vermonters, couldn't name a single concentration camp or ghetto. They thought that maybe 2 million Jews had been killed. And we know that at least 6 million Jews had been killed. And a large percentage of these young people felt that Jews had caused the Holocaust. So this was a very worrying result of this conference and this survey. And it made it even more important that we teach the facts of history to our students here in Vermont. And so this, I'll just wrap up by saying that we are pleased to say that two bills have been introduced in the Senate and the House this session that calls for an act relating to Holocaust education in public schools. It's drafted right now. Senators Ginny Lyons and Kesha Ram Hinsdale have sponsored the Senate version and 19 representatives in the House have also sponsored this bill. It has gone to the Education Committees now. It's pending discussion. And we hope that by the spring that it could be brought forward and become an act and become established here in Vermont. So we ask you to reach out to your senators and legislators as soon as possible and tell them how you feel and how you know that this is most important. Especially now we see so many incidents of hatred in our community. It's essential that we get this into our schools as soon as possible. So that's what I have to say today. I know I'm going to stay for Tom's presentation and you're welcome to ask me or Tom questions following Tom's presentation. And I hope that you'll stay and make a leaf. We'll put it in our collection and we very much hope that you have some expression that you can put down on your leaf, say something, a thought, a feeling and we could put it into our collection. Thank you so much. I'd like to introduce Tom Blazer now who's going to tell his family's story. Tom grew up in Long Island, New York and after graduating from the University of Vermont he and his wife Jill decided to stay in Vermont and he now lives on beautiful Lake Champlain in Shelbourne. He grew up downhill skiing in the Northeast and enjoys stock car racing, boating and water skiing. Tom and Jill have three sons and three grandchildren. Since he and his wife sold their auto parts business, BFCP and Plattsburgh major motor service he now spends his time speaking in high schools and to other groups sharing his family's World War II and Holocaust experiences. In hoping to educate students and others so that it will never happen again. Tom will be speaking about stories he heard from his parents while growing up. From a 90 minute talk his father gave at a local high school in 1994. From a 24 page letter his father wrote to his cousin four months before being liberated and some additional details from the US Holocaust Museum in DC. He'll also talk about how the Holocaust was always in his background and how it affected him growing up. And let's welcome Tom Blazer. Thank you so much. Well, welcome and thank you for coming to hear about my family's experience during World War II. First, I don't want to assume that everybody knows the history. So I want to give you a brief overview of the years from 1933 to 1945 in Europe. Adolf Hitler, a Nazi was voted into power in Germany in 1933 in an open democratic election just like we have here in the United States. He then changed Germany into a dictatorship. He wanted to conquer all of Europe and created a systematic plan to eliminate all the Jewish people and all other minorities including those of other races, sexualities and religions. During the years from 1939 to 1945, like Miriam said, the Nazis killed six million Jews. So about 10 times the population of Vermont. And another five million of other minorities. And this is what's known as the Holocaust and this is my family's story during those years. Here's a picture of my family about 1965. I'm the boy on the right. My older brother George was three years older than me. My parents, Victor and Daisy. Here's a map of Europe at the time. So both of my parents were Holocaust survivors. Of the 5,000 Jews taken from Prague in 1941 to the Lodz ghetto in Poland. Only 135 survived and only 19 couples. I would like to tell you why I'm speaking to you today because speaking to groups is definitely out of my comfort zone. But I feel like I need to be doing what my father would be doing if he was still alive. And that is speaking to people so that this story is never forgotten. Like the saying goes, never again. I'm sorry if some of what I'm going to share with you is hard to hear. Some of it is gross and truly disgusting. But the fact of the matter of it is that it was. It's not a pretty story but there's one good thing. My parents survived and I'm here, yay. So this is the story of my parents and some relatives who unfortunately I never got a chance to know and love. Here's a picture from, oops, not quite working. There we go. Turn it off, turn it back on. Okay. Here's a picture from 1914 of the Glazer family. This is my father on the right side. He's about seven years old there. He was born in 1907. Next to him there were his parents. His father had four brothers and two sisters. A couple of his cousins and my great-grandparents there. And here's a picture of my great-grandparents. So I am the first one in my family to be born in the United States. I was born in 1950, about a year after my parents emigrated to the United States. My parents grew up in Prague, Czechoslovakia. In nice homes, loving parents. My father was quite good at soccer. He played the violin. He later taught himself how to play the game of bridge. Bridge, if you don't know, is a card game. It's not a game of luck. You need to look at the whole situation and plan a strategy to win. He got to be quite good at bridge and played for the Czech national team. Later on in life, he would play in tournaments all over the world. The Germans invaded and took over Czechoslovakia on March 15th, 1939. My parents were dating at the time. Knowing what was happening in the world, they decided to get married in hopes that the families would not separate, I'm sorry, that the Germans would not separate families. My father tried to get his parents to leave the country. But my grandparents refused. They said that they were too old to start over somewhere else. They only knew Czech and that since they were old, what could happen to them? They had a business, their home, their life, and they refused to leave. And my father would not leave without his parents. Over the ensuing months and years, the Nazis began restricting Jews from more and more of society. Simple activities like going to a park, theaters, restaurants were not allowed. Their businesses were taken away from them and they were not allowed to do certain jobs. They were required to wear the yellow star of David on their clothing to publicly reveal themselves as being Jewish. As the Nazis began taking the freedoms from the Jews, honest, law-abiding citizens like my father started doing not so law-abiding things. My father, along with one of his uncles, started smuggling money and valuables of his own and for others out of the country on trains. He would go to the train yard late at night and put money and valuables underneath the train and then tell his cousin, one of the boys in the picture, who was in Paris at the time on what train and the train number that the package was under. Unfortunately, eventually they got caught and he went to a German Gestapo prison. He spent 10 months in jail. They beat him quite badly while interrogating him. Little did he know that this was nothing compared to what was ahead. Eventually, his father had to come up with a lot of dollars and check crowns to get him released. I will now play the first of three videos of my father speaking when he came to my son, Adam's class, here in Vermont at CVU in 1994. The Jewish families had to prepare a list of all their possessions, including what they had in bank wars. Then the Nazis notified us that they prepared five transports each to contain 1,000 Jews. My parents and my wife's parents and her brother and my wife and myself, we were designated for the second transport. In our transport, there were mainly doctors, lawyers, and there were some business people. We had to bring along the list of our possessions and we're allowed two pieces of luggage for each person. I had a $100 bill and went to my friend place of birth, Bodice, I said, around 40 miles south of Prague, it's a small town, and I burned it that money in a small metal container near a tree. Three days before our departure, we assembled in a big hall. Soldiers were patrolling around the building and inside there was only one officer who had a revolver in his head. He was turning the window around his finger. Then each family was called separately and we had to sign in as we gave it that all the possessions which we enumerated in the list and all the jewelry, et cetera, which was in our wars is being given without any force by us to the German state. He slept on the floors and used the luggage as pillows. We had to walk to a station which was not too far, each carrying our luggage. I had my mother, but she had a terrible time she'd been up with the procession. We were put on a train, but did not know where it was going. I remember only that we arrived in the Lodz ghetto in Poland on October 26th, 1941. Our arrival, the ghetto had already about 150 to 200,000 Polish Jews. We were brought into a school where we slept on the floors. After about two weeks, big trucks came in front of the school and soldiers came into the school where we slept and took all small children and babies and threw them into the truck from the second and third floor windows, killing all while their mothers watched and screamed in English. The sixth transport. That's a minute. The conditions got worse and worse. Many suffered and died from starvation and diseases like typhus, tuberculosis, pneumonia, typhoid, dysentery and other infectious diseases. Very little food was available and what there was was awful. My father used to say that in normal times you wouldn't feed it to pigs. After about four or five months of starving and not being able to do anything about and not seeing the end of his suffering, my uncle Fedor, my mother's younger brother who was about 16 years old, wanted out of there. In hopes of better conditions, he volunteered to get on one of the many transports out of Lodz. And my mother's parents went with him as well. They wouldn't let him travel alone. They were never heard from again. So my mother, who was only 20 years old, lost both her brother and her parents. Here's a picture of my father about Bar Mitzvah age with his parents. On August 18th, 1942, so almost a year after being in Lodz, my father's father, Zygman, passed away. My father dug a hole and buried his father. Of course, he didn't have a casket. So he found some pieces of wood to cover the body. That's all he could do for him. Three weeks after my grandfather died on September 8th, 1942, there was something called the selection. Unfortunately, my grandmother, Ludmila, was selected. She was taken away, never to be seen again. Now it was just my parents left. Over the next couple years, my parents continued to struggle to live very little food and lots of disease. My mother got typhus, had 104 temperature for a period of three months. If you have 106, you die. My father was hospitalized with pneumonia. The doctors didn't think that he would survive. My mother said many times that if my father wasn't so determined to survive that she didn't know if she would have. My father would say the Germans might win the battle but he would win the war. He was very stubborn, clever, resourceful, and it had incredible willpower. In August of 1944, they were taken to Auschwitz. Auschwitz is one of 44,000 concentration camps and ghettos that the Nazis constructed. There in front of Dr. Joseph Mengele, who you see in the picture, they met their destiny. If you went to his left, you were killed in the gas chambers. If you went to his right, you were safe. The men were in the front, the women were in the back. My mother, my father was the last man and my mother was the first woman. My mother knew that she went to the same side as my father and that if there was any way to survive that my father would find a way. And that gave her the strength to continue. My simple distinction between a concentration camp and a ghetto is a ghetto is like the worst slum you've ever seen. In lunch, like my father said, there were maybe 150 to 200,000 but it's surrounded by a fence so you cannot leave. And I believe it was only one mile by one mile. So you can imagine how crowded it was. Eight, 10 people in a room, no plumbing, no sewer system, very few of the places had water. And then a concentration camp, all right, that's worse. That's like a prison. You're separated from your families and you don't have any of your own possessions. In Auschwitz, the men had to go into a small room, take off all their clothes. Then a young German soldier whipped them from one end of the room to the other. Then they were given their clothes to wear, a striped shirt, pants, no underwear, and wooden crocs. However, my father would say, yeah, but those crocs got holes in the soles. Their housing, wooden bunks to sleep on, no blankets, never a shower, buckets or a hole in the floor to go to the bathroom, no toilet paper, no water to drink, heat, air conditioning, mm-mm. From Auschwitz, my mother went to a camp called Gross Rosen. The camp had only women and they worked in an underground munitions factory. It was a short walk from the camp. She was eventually liberated and returned to Prague on May 8th, 1945. I don't know much more about what happened to my mother because she didn't talk about very much. My father had it much worse. Here is a map that I got off of Google to just to show his travels. It starts on the left side and Prague goes up to Lodge, down to Auschwitz. Then you'll hear about a three-day train ride to the Bavarian area of Germany and then a little loop there, he was in nine camps. I won't bore you with the names of all the camps, but most of them in that area there. In September of 1944, so about a month after he was in Auschwitz, they selected 640 of the strongest men that they told them they were going to be going on a three-day train ride. Of course, this is not Amtrak, this is a crowded cattle car. They were given food that was to last them for the three days. My father used to go, yeah, three portions of bread, a few pieces of salami and some margarine. That's it for the three days. So what did my father do? He ate it all in the beginning. He said that way, he for once felt a little bit better and during the three-day train ride, nobody could take it from him. And then he expected to get fed when they got there. They didn't get fed that day, not until the next day. The three-day train ride brought them to the Bavarian area of Germany to a camp called Riedelo in the southern part of Germany. He was there approximately four months until January of 1945. Some of what he survived was getting up at three o'clock in the morning, marching five miles, doing hard physical labor, such as building secret factories for the Nazis or working on roads. Then of course, five miles back, returning at eight o'clock at night, day after day after day. Many of the men were dying every day. Then my father had to dig the mass graves. Then he had to carry the naked bodies over his shoulder to the graves. However, before he could place the bodies in the graves, he had to check their teeth to see if they had any gold fillings and then pull the teeth and give them to the guards. He buried 256 fellow prisoners. I heard that number all my life. After the war, he would travel twice a year to Europe on business. On most all of those trips, he would make it a point to go to Relo to the cemetery where he buried all those people and say, Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. He took me there once. It was an incredibly moving experience. He did say that there was one nice guard. One time while he was delivering coal to the officer's cabins, he passed a guard and the guard whispered to him that in cabin number 18, there's a bowl of soup. Have it. So when he did and he was delivering to all these, he saw a German newspaper. So he quickly looked at it and he saw that the Americans, that the allies were approaching. And that gave him a little hope that maybe the end was near. In 1987, my father took me, my wife and our three sons to Europe. And one of the places he wanted to show us was where he had been during the war. He brought us to Dachau. It's huge. He took us to where the gas chambers are. He told us of the stench when the bodies were burning. He also showed us where he stayed. It was a room about six feet by four feet with three bunks, no bit wider than this. And there were six men assigned to each bunk. The three bunks were one on top of another. On the floor was a bucket for one nature called. When the bucket was full, one of the men would have to take the bucket, carry it, run down to the end of the hall and dump it. If he spilled any of it, he would have to take his bare butt and clean it on the cement floor. During the day, the six men would have to sit on the top bunk with no more than, I don't know, 18 inches a foot, two feet maybe of room, hunched over, sitting on the wooden bunk all day long. And if you knew my father, sitting doing nothing is a torture. One of the worst things that my father said was one day a water truck came to give them showers. It was a cold day in February. They had to strip naked, get a quick spray and then walk to their clothes and get dressed. They were walking barefoot on the ice. I will now play the next excerpt from my father speaking about his last hunger march. At this point, my father weighs about 90 pounds and they go about 60 miles. I don't know about you, but I can't imagine doing that. On the 24th of April, 1945, we started the hunger march from Turkmen. Soldiers were leading the way. More of them were in the middle of the procession and some went at the end. We had to carry their suitcases. I believe that we might have been 100 prisoners and about 10 soldiers. While we were watching, other soldiers in tanks were driving from the other side and purposely hit the procession carrying about 10 or 12. We and even the soldiers did not get any food. Suddenly, the soldiers ordered us to stop walking and as I was in front, I saw that they were calling for food indicating that they would not continue to go if they don't get this. They made us sit alongside the road and after several hours, a small truck came with some food. The soldiers ate their portions and then they gave us a small piece of bread with soup. I was among the few who were supposed to divide the food among the rest. Suddenly, I got a big smirk in my face, simply because the soldier wanted me to be on his left rather than on his right. But one thing I remember, this was the very last beating I got. After we were stopped about four to five hours, they ordered us to continue. We started to get darker and we were passing Lansberg. On the outskirts of the city, there was a little empty house in the middle of the field and the soldiers slept in the house and we were sleeping on grass outside. Suddenly, it started to rain. And we continued to sleep. The next morning, we continued through Felsenfeldbrook and arrived in the dark in Dachau. We were standing in front of the gates for at least two hours until we had to continue because there was no space for us. After another one and a half days of force matching, we arrived in Alach. We were brought into a very big building and they were locked. So they arrived in Alach, soaking wet, and slept on the cold, concrete floors. But my father said they slept very well. They were so exhausted. After a night of bombs flying overhead, the German soldiers left the camp and the American soldiers came into the camp. Finally, Liberation Day, April 30th, 1945. I would say the hardest thing my father would talk about is when the Americans came and freed them. When they were finally liberated by the American soldiers, the American soldiers were shocked to see how emaciated and starved the prisoners were. And they immediately gave them their food, which were things like chocolate and salami. My father somehow knew that he shouldn't eat all of the fatty food that the soldiers were giving them after starving for so long and begged the others not to eat too much. Many of the now survivors did not listen to his advice. It turns out that there's a biological response that the body has when being reintroduced to food after starvation that can be lethal. It was not known until after World War II when it's now called refeeding syndrome. The result was many of these survivors died from this refeeding syndrome within days of being free. My father would often talk of the horrors he witnessed during the Holocaust and could do so without becoming over-emotional like me. However, when he spoke of liberation and those that died, he would tear up. I'll now play you the last video. The day came to go home. A very few soldiers brought us on trucks, until Pearson, and from there we went to Prague on a train. We arrived in Prague-Smilchow, which is a suburb of Prague at six o'clock in the morning. We were waiting until seven o'clock to call somebody. We had no money, but everybody wanted to give us check crowds so that we could call. At seven a.m. I called my friends a builder. There was a big hello. But all I wanted to hear was that my wife survived the Holocaust. I got some wonderful news she's waiting for. So my father went to where my mother was, shortly after their incredibly joyful reunion, they went to where my father had buried the $100 bill, and they found it. They changed it on the black market into check crowds, and with that they started to build their lives together. My father got back into business buying and selling feathers and down. My brother was born in Prague in 1947. All was going well. And then the Czech Communist Party came into power on February 25th, 1948, and they could see the handwriting on the wall. My mother said, we missed one train. We're not missing the next one. Somehow my father found somebody to give them false papers and documents showing that they were Polish Jews. This man arranged for them to get on a train of Polish Jews heading to Israel. They got off the train in Germany and made their way to Frankfurt. There they found somebody who they knew very well to get them visas, sign their visas to get to the United States. They could have gone to a number of other countries right away, but they wanted to come to the United States. However, they had to wait nine months because the U.S. was only allowing 2,000 Czech refugees to come to the United States, but they made it. And about one year later, me. I'll now tell you what I call my stick story. This is something that I had to live with about half my life. All my life I heard my father telling me this, not telling me this story directly, but I would overhear this story as I'm the little kid in the next room, you know, when your parents have friends or neighbors over and I'm three, five, eight, 15, I hear this story over and over again. So my father would say, sometimes during their roll call, when they're outside a, one of the guards would say, you step forward and you step forward. We're gonna give you a stick. You're gonna beat him until he's dead. If you don't do it. We give him the stick and he beats you until you're dead. If you need the one of you does it, I'll take care of it and I'll kill both of you. All my life I heard this story, but I could never ask my father if he ever did it. Then on that trip in 1987 in Dachau, we were standing out there and he tells me and my wife and our three sons this story. And I finally got up the guts to ask him, did you ever have to do this? I was afraid of what I might hear. And he said he never had to do it. I broke down and cried. Like I said earlier, my mother really didn't say too much about her years during the Holocaust. When I was a freshman at UVM, my mother was 48 years old and she committed suicide. Many years later, a close friend of hers told me that she might have survived the war, but she was a casualty of it. Dealing with losing my mother at the age of 19 was the hardest thing that ever happened to me in my lifetime. I feel like I had a great childhood. We did many things together as a family. In the winter time, we went skiing every vacation every weekend. My brother and I were very good at ski racing. My brother came in fifth in the junior nationals one year. I came in second in New York State, both my junior and senior year of high school. In the summertime, we would go boating every weekend, water skiing, which I still love to do today. However, the Holocaust was always in the background. For example, we would never throw food out. We were always expected to eat whatever was on our plate. To this day, I rarely leave anything on my plate. And I never knew what I could ask and what I couldn't about their past experiences. Here's a picture of my father at the age of 75 at our house in Shelburne with our three boys, Jamie, Adam and Daniel. And here's a picture of our family get together at Thanksgiving. My oldest is on the right, that's Jamie. His wife, Danielle, in the middle on the bottom are two granddaughters, Raven and Brianna, 16 and 13. Next to Danielle is Adam, my middle son, his wife, Adrienne. You see me, my youngest son, Daniel, there. His ex-wife is not in the picture. She's in California with our grandson, who's eight, Mason. Next to me is my wife, who you might see here in the audience somewhere. And the other couple, Ron and Barbara. And Thanksgiving is a very special holiday for us. Barbara and I grew up like brother and sister. And her parents went through the Holocaust with my parents. So two of those 19 couples. And they landed in the United States on Thanksgiving in 1949. There's hardly maybe been one or two Thanksgiving's when I haven't celebrated with Barbara and her parents, my parents when they were alive. So it's always a special day. And she, like I say, she grew up like a sister to me and to this day. So thank you. I'd love to take any questions. If you ever have any, if you have any comments you wanna email me, I'm more than happy to respond. If you go to Tom Glazer Holocaust, there is a YouTube video of this presentation. Please share it with anybody and anybody you think should hear it. Thank you.