More than 40 students and faculty members gathered to hear guest speaker Renate Frydman lecture about the Holocaust on Wednesday, April 15 at the Sinclair Community College Englewood Learning Center.
Her presentation, “Lessons of the Holocaust,” was a personal message about the damage racism and prejudice can cause in society, if left unchecked.
Frydman, a survivor of the Holocaust, spoke in detail about her and her family’s experiences. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, she can remember little else about her childhood outside of the Holocaust. She and her parents were able to escape from Germany when she was 2. Their escape was due to the foresight of her grandfather and the kindness of a stranger, according to Frydman.
“I am told that someone threw a stone from an apartment into my carriage when I was young,” Frydman said. “The Nazi Party had just been voted into power and (Adolph) Hitler installed himself as dictator.Around this time, my grandfather decided that it was time for us to have a better life.”
Frydman told the crowd that her family felt the increasing pressure of the Nazi presence on their lives.
“My father’s business was taken from him,” Frydman said. “Our apartment was constantly watched.”
She told the audience that complicated paperwork was needed in order to leave Germany. An affidavit, signed by an American citizen willing to “sponsor” the person and their family was required. For over a year and a half, her grandparents and parents wrote letters in an attempt to escape Nazi-controlled Germany. The economic crisis of the 1930’s made that process difficult, said Frydman. Few American families were able, or willing, to sign for Jewish immigrants, according to the speaker.
“On Nov. 9, 1938, the German government initiated a huge riot against the Jewish citizens,” Frydman said. ‘”They destroyed Jewish buildings, and arrested over 30,000 Jewish men to be sent to concentration camps.”
The incident, known as “The Night of Broken Glass,” lasted for two days. Jewish stores were trashed or looted, dozens of Jews were killed and every Jewish synagogue in Nazi Germany was destroyed, according to Frydman.
“In the meantime, a stranger had signed papers for us to leave,” Frydman said. “Someone had warned my father that he was on the list to be arrested. On the morning of Nov. 10, my mother put on a green jacket like the Hitler youth wore and made her way…to retrieve the papers for us to leave.”
Frydman and her parents were able to make it to the train station, narrowly avoiding the Nazi Gestapo. The train took her family to a boat that sailed to England, where they stayed with relatives.
“I knew we were running for our lives,” Frydman says, “I was one of the lucky ones. I was able to escape with my family.”
Frydman, who came to Dayton when she was four, stressed to the audience the importance of educating people about the Holocaust. She said that she is appalled when people try to suggest that the Holocaust never happened.
During her lecture, she showed the students pictures of her grandparents and other relatives. One photograph she held up was of her husband’s family. He was the only surviving member of his immediate family.
Every person in the photograph had perished in the Holocaust.
After several years, the lecturer said that she was able to track down the man who had signed the papers to her family out of Germany. She wrote him a letter thanking him for “having the courage” to sign those papers. Although Frydman was able to talk to him on the phone, the man died the day before she was scheduled to meet him in person.
She attended his funeral.
Several students found themselves fighting back tears during the lecture. Sherry Woodward, a student attending classes at Englewood Learning Center was glad she was able to meet Frydman.
“I didn’t know anything about the Holocaust,” Woodward said.
Frydman, who has been speaking about the Holocaust for 40 years, ended her presentation by challenging the students not to accept racial injustice and intolerance.
“So many Jews and non-Jewish people were killed, while people stood idly by and watched it happen,” said the survivor. “We can’t afford to allow this to happen. We’ve got to step up today and say ‘Wait a minute, that’s not right.'”
Renate Frydman is founder of the Dayton Holocaust Resource Center and is a Board Member of the Holocaust Remembrance Committee at Sinclair Community College.
Additional information about Holocaust can be found at www.sinclair.edu/organizations/holocaust/ and at daytonholocaust.org.