Topics: profiles
Trauma of Life After Hiding
First Payment to a Survivor Made in Sri Lanka The Claims Conference recently made our first-ever compensation payment in Sri Lanka. Hans Vischjager survived the Holocaust as a child hidden with a non-Jewish family in the Netherlands and has been living in Sri Lanka since 1999. He decided after decades of emotional trauma to finally […]
Survivor Story: Lucia Heilman
Living Through the Nazi Annexation of Austria “On March 12, German troops marched into Austria. I was eight years old. As I reached the vicinity of Helden-Platz I couldn’t go any further – there were so many people on the Ring Road and on the side streets. And I stood there and heard the yells, the […]
Survivor Story: Toman Brod
Before the Holocaust Toman Brod, born in 1929, grew up in a well-to-do assimilated Jewish family in Prague, which he described as “an idyllic city” before the war. He never experienced anti-Semitism and had Jews and non-Jews as friends. Toman recalls the delicious food that Anci Kopska, the family’s cook, prepared, including “superb” bread dumplings, […]
Survivor Story: Anne Kelemen
Enduring Kristallnacht Anne Kelemen, now of New York City, was a girl of 13 on Nov. 9, 1938, when her father’s textiles shop in Vienna was ransacked and destroyed by brown-shirted youths. Culminating months of a deteriorating environment for Jewish residents of the Austrian capital, Kristallnacht – “the night of broken glass” – marked an ominous […]
Survivor Story: Elza Gorbanov
Elza Had to Flee Her Home During the Holocaust, and Then Was Forced to Flee Again From the Conflict in Ukraine Elza Gorbanov fled from the Nazis as a young girl living in Donetsk, Ukraine. After the war she and her family returned home, and that is where Elza was recently receiving aid from the Claims Conference, […]
