Lois Silverstein, Ph.D. – When Crying Stops

Lois Silverstein, Ph.D. – When Crying Stops

Created from a combination of survivor testimony, research, and imagination, When Crying Stops tells a story about the Glattshteyns of Chernowitz, Romania, Meier, Golde, and Chane, how they were drawn into the war in the 1920s and 1930s and survived until today. It is rich with first-hand experience, historical perspectives, reflections on resilience and human endurance, and a thoughtful look at war, oppression, and loss.

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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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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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