Guest speaker: Marion Weinzweig
Thursday, April 8, 6:45 pm
Via live stream from Ohef Sholom Temple, on the Holocaust Commission’s Facebook page, www.facebook.com/holcommission.
Join United Jewish Federation of Tidewater’s Holocaust Commission’s annual Yom Hashoah commemoration for an evening to honor local Holocaust survivors and remember the six million Jews who were murdered during the Shoah.
MARION WEINZWEIG
Born in Poland, in 1941, Marion Weinzweig is among the youngest of all Holocaust survivors. When she was 18 months old, her parents entrusted her to a non-Jewish business associate and his wife to protect her. When the Nazis were closing in, that family placed her in an orphanage where she was raised as a Catholic by nuns, who had no idea of her Jewish background. They reared her with many of the stereotypes of the time, and she grew up thinking, “Jews were horrible people!”
Marion’s mother perished at Treblinka. At the war’s end, her father, who had survived ghettos and slave labor camps, came to retrieve her. Poland was not a safe place for Jews after the war, so Marion’s father smuggled her into Germany, which was ironically then the safest place for Jews, with the Allies in control. As the only Jewish child amid the displaced persons, speaking only Polish and having to learn German and Yiddish, Marion felt lonely and isolated.
With the survivors’ burdens placed on a child, she moved with what remained of her family to Canada when the opportunity arose. Her journey to healing and back to Judaism began there, and continued after her move to the United States. Today she lives in Arizona and has traveled the world sharing her story of survival, documented in her book, Lonely Chameleon, to make sure that the history is not forgotten.
