Drs. Irmtrud Wojak & Ilona Ziok: Keeping Fritz Bauer’s Legacy Alive
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Drs. Irmtrud Wojak & Ilona Ziok: Keeping Fritz Bauer’s Legacy Alive

Saturday September 23, 2023

Dr. Irmtrud Wojak is the managing director of the Buxus Stiftung GmbH and initiator of the Fritz Bauer Forum in Bochum. She is a historian, author, and curator. Her research focuses on contemporary legal history, exile, and cultures of remembrance.

Filmmaker Ilona Ziok was born in Poland and lived in England, Germany, and France. She studied directing film & theater, history of art- and media, political science & Slavic languages in Frankfurt, New York, and Moscow.

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How Growing Up as a Child of Holocaust Survivors Has Shaped My Life
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How Growing Up as a Child of Holocaust Survivors Has Shaped My Life

“As I look over my life I have identified certain struggles linked to my upbringing:

Raised by two refugees from the Nazis—my mother from Berlin, and my father from Metz. They had both been politically active before they were forced to leave, my father was a Social Democrat, and my mother was in the communist movement.

I struggled with how to be an American culturally and find a place in the work world that felt safe for me. ”

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A Child Survivor of the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp

A Child Survivor of the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp

When Gerson Finlev was 2 years old, the Nazis imprisoned him and his family in the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague. The Finlevs remained there for 18 months until they were freed and returned to their home in Denmark. 15,000 children were deported to Theresienstadt. Only 100 came home, including Gerson and his brother. In this presentation, Gerson discusses his family’s story and survival in Theresienstadt.

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Reflections – Growing up Culturally Jewish in America

Reflections – Growing up Culturally Jewish in America

Born in New Jersey in April 1945, just 3 weeks before the end of war in Europe, Guy grew up in perhaps the greatest period of US prosperity and expanding worldwide influence.

Deeply influenced both by his first-generation extended family and their roots in 19th century Eastern Europe, and his fractured orthodox Hebrew education, Guy traces his growth in post-war America beginning with his Yiddish-speaking parents, to his motivation for learning German to his post-graduate study in Germany and later reckoning with the reality the Holocaust.

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Growing Up in a Twice-Nuclear Holocaust-Refugee Family
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Growing Up in a Twice-Nuclear Holocaust-Refugee Family

My mother and father met as students at a physics lecture in Berlin Germany, pre-Hitler, though they only married in exile, on the sidelines of the US nuclear-bomb project. Most of my mother’s extended family was scattered to the far corners of the earth, but her own parents were murdered early in the Holocaust—a fact I learned as a very small child, right at the end of WWII. When my mother died in 1998, I came across letters in German written by her mother, in the late 1930s. The Gerlind Institute recently translated some for me—the first time I had any real sense of my grandmother’s own thoughts.

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