This year the Holocaust Memorial Lecture will showcase a love story set during World War II. Students will have the opportunity to listen and ask questions to the son of two Holocaust survivors.
Frank Felsenstein — who was appointed a Reed D. Voran Honors Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Ball State in 2002 — is the son of Moritz Felsenstein and Vera Hirsch. The couple fell in love in Leipzig, Germany, in 1936. The Nazis had been in power for three years.
Frank Felsenstein, Photo Courtesy
According to the event description, Hirsch was able to escape to England, while Moritz evaded an arrest warrant by traveling to the Soviet Union.
Their relationship was documented through journals they kept and letters they sent to one another.
Felsenstein will speak on behalf of his parents April 10 at 7:10 p.m. in the Arts and Journalism Building, room 175.
The university will host the lecture ahead of Yom Hashoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 12, which marks the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Felsenstein will speak in place of Holocaust survivor Maude Dahme, whose lecture was canceled due to inclimate weather on March 21.
RELATED: Holocaust survivor speech canceled due to storm
In 1942, Dahme and her family received a letter from the Nazi’s instructing them to go to the train station with a single suitcase. Suspicious of the Nazi’s intent, the family hid Dahme and her sister Rita at a Christian family’s house. The family was reunited after the war.
"Increasingly, in many corners of the world, the Holocaust is being either minimized or denied; we provide these speakers so that students, in particular, may be armed against such politically-motivated attempts to alter history," said Francine Friedman, a professor of political science and Director of the Ball State Jewish Studies Program in a March interview with The Daily News.
Contact Kraig Younts with comments at jkyounts@bsu.edu.
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