The 2017 Holocaust Remembrance program Remember Us? Stolen Lives – What Could Have Been presented by Temple Shalom at St. Timothy’s Catholic Church on Monday afternoon was very well received by the large crowd that attended. This year’s program commemorating the more than one million children of the Holocaust featured a vignette imagining Anne Frank as a grandmother celebrating her 75th birthday surrounded by accomplished friends and her granddaughter. The vignette written by Phyllis Kalter, co-chair of the Tri-County Holocaust Remembrance committee, presents Frank as an accomplished writer, telling her daughter why she threw away her diary of her time in the war because of the bad memories of that time in her life.
Introducing her vignette Kalter asked “How can we understand the true loss of these children? What would they have achieved? The death of a child is the death of infinite possibilities.”
While Frank did not survive and her future can only be imagined, keynote speaker Joseph Fenster did survive and his life story really brought home the theme of What Could Have Been. Fenster sharing his story publicly for the first time talked about his childhood in Paris and his current life in the Villages being an avid pickle ballplayer. It is the in-between part of this 85-year old’s story that is so gripping. He lost both parents in Auschwitz. His grandmother’s cousin heard about a Righteous Parish Priest that was hiding Jewish boys. He was sent to Normandy hidden as a Catholic orphan, baptized to have official papers and served as an altar boy. German soldiers did investigate the priest, but having the papers spared his life.
He witnessed the U.S. troops arriving before and after D-Day. At the age of 14, weighing only 57 pounds he made his way to the United States. He bounced around among family members and graduated from a military school. He was offered a scholarship to Georgia Tech, but turned it down. Even with a scholarship he did not have the money to attend college. He worked for an oil company and joined the Air Force in 1952. He spent 20 years in the Air Force mostly overseas and met his wife Arlette in France in 1955. In 1976 he completed his college degree and then spent 18 years working for Raytheon. Retiring in 1998 he and Arlette made their way to The Villages. Fenster said his proudest moment is when he became a U.S. citizen in 1950.
Children were also part of the program.
The Villages Charter School Chorus under the direction of Hunter Britton performed and the middle school students earning awards for either art or essays as part of the Holocaust Education Contest were recognized.
