Program

After four of her older siblings were deported to a Belgian concentration camp, Fadja Wittelsohn, her brother and mother began two years of hiding in the basement of a private residence in Bruxelles. Their view of the world was limited to feet walking past the one window they had, where they lived in constant fear of being found.

Newly uncovered documents and photographs of her mother's siblings have added a new layer to her recently updated talk.  With the help of a Belgium-based researcher, pictures that had never been seen, deportation lists and detailed records that fill in the stories that her family had only ever heard snippets of add layers to the story that need to be shared.

70 years later her daughter Gayle is keenly aware of the importance of telling her mother’s story while navigating through the sensitive and complicated terrain of passing the torch to her teenage daughter as the keeper of this critical piece of cultural history.