 |
|
 |
|||||
|
|
Students Observe Yom HaShoah
 On the heels of the historic opening of Skokie’s Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, Ida Crown Jewish Academy students and faculty gathered on Holocaust Memorial Day, Yom HaShoah v’HaGevurah, to hear from Mr. Walter Reed of the museum’s speakers’ bureau. Reed, of Wilmette, spent more than an hour describing his personal story, as part of the kinder transport to Belgium, and the story of the heroes he encountered.Reed opened by saying, “Nearly all Holocaust stories are similar, but none are exactly the same. My story is about people like you. About teenagers and those younger, and what happened to them.” Reed and his father were arrested in 1938, on the night of Kristalnacht. Though Reed was later released because he was only 14, his father was sent to Dachau for several weeks. “The only reason I am here today is because my dad was sent to Dachau,” exclaimed Reed. It was the horror that Reed’s father witnessed in the work camp that gave him the courage to send Reed on a kinder transport to Belgium in 1939, never to see his son again. “One thousand kids came to Belgium. Every one of those parents is a hero,” says Reed. After only a year in a boys’ home in Brussels, the Germans invaded Belgium and Reed and the other children in the boys’ home and a nearby girls’ home were forced to escape a second time. They were taken to a vacant barn just south of Toulouse, France. Conditions were miserable, with no running water, electricity or furniture. Reed was able to escape to America, thanks to the help of uncles and aunts in Brooklyn, where he was later drafted into the army. Reed went to Normandy and interrogated German prisoners. The rest of his immediate family perished in the Holocaust. Of the 93 children that had been in the barn with him in France, 80 of them survived by escaping to neutral countries or joining the French resistance fighters. Many thanks to current parent, Robert Kandelman, for recommending that the Academy invite Mr. Reed to speak. |
