Presented by Debby Berlyne
November 9 – 10:30 a.m. – noon – Flax Library
Please join the Women’s Network for Debby Berlyne’s account of her mother’s life. Hilde Strauss was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1930. A couple of weeks after Kristallnacht in late 1938, her parents sent her and her brother out of Germany by train. This trip was part of a series of programs, now known as the Kindertransport, to get Jewish children to safety from the Nazis in other countries. Hilde Strauss lived in an orphanage in Brussels, Belgium, from 1938 to 1946. Debby will describe her mother’s experiences of antisemitism in Germany, wartime deprivations in Nazi-occupied Belgium, what it was like to grow up without parents, and how (we believe) she avoided arrest by the Nazis. The story includes what happened to her mother’s brother and parents, life after moving to the United States in 1946, and the long-term effects of her Holocaust experiences.
