The 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day was observed in Tidewater with a special presentation by Dr. Roger and Win Loria at the MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk on May 8. United Jewish Federation of Tidewater’s Holocaust Commission partnered with the MacArthur Memorial and the Virginia Holocaust Museum to host the well-attended event.
A Holocaust survivor, Dr. Loria was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1940. Soon after his birth, the Nazis invaded Belgium. His family attempted to flee several times but were sent back to Antwerp. His father, who was not a Belgian citizen, felt that Loria and his mother would be safer on their own. Unfortunately, he was captured in France in 1942 and died of starvation in Auschwitz, one month before the war ended.
Loria and his mother had a much longer odyssey. In 1942 they made their way to France in search of his father. They were detained with other mothers and children in Vichy France or “Free France,” which was not free at all. After one escape they were deported to Rivesaltes, a transit camp in the south of France, where they lived in terrible conditions. Loria and his mother escaped and headed to the Swiss border, and as they got closer, Loria recalls, “We had to crawl on our bellies toward the barbed wire because the Germans had made ditches so you would slip and break your neck.” Intercepted by the Swiss authorities and caught again, Loria and his mother were sent to a refugee camp within Switzerland, where they remained until the end of WWII. During this journey, Loria says that although he was just three years old by the time they were making their last escape, he often served as his mother’s eyes, since at one point she lost her glasses.
Win Loria, who is from Virginia, tells the story of her father as a GI during WWII. Her father’s participation in liberating the Ohrsdruf concentration camp, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, and the first camp to be liberated by American forces, enabled him to have a deep understanding of her husband’s experience, she says. Loria and his mother were repatriated back to Belgium from Switzerland after the war, and in 1949 they moved to Israel, where he served in the Israeli Army.
From Israel, Loria eventually moved to the United States to continue his education as a Rockefeller Foundation scholar. His extensive academic career spanned 52 years and thousands of medical and graduate students. Loria retired as an internationally recognized expert in virology and immunology and an emeritus professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Medical College.
Only 10% of Belgium’s Jews survived the war. Loria closed his presentation with a reminder to the audience that they should not take for granted their basic civil liberties, especially now, and that it is everyone’s responsibility to call out hate and bigotry. “People are not born hateful,” he says. “They learn it.”
A recording of the presentation is available on the MacArthur Memorial’s YouTube channel.
For more information about the Holocaust Commission, contact Elka Mednick at emednick@ujft.org or 757-965-6112.