Post by Jaga on Jan 23, 2008 17:49:57 GMT -7
Miles Lerman was also a partisan in Polish forests:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/23/AR2008012302503.html?hpid=artslot
Miles Lerman, 88, who as a young man fought the Nazis in the forests of Poland and who helped found the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as an enduring reminder of the millions who perished, died yesterday at his home in Philadelphia. The cause of death was "multiple complications of aging," his daughter said.
...
The New Jersey businessman also was the force behind the creation of the Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance, dedicated to dispelling the myth that Jews did not resist the Nazis and their collaborators.
"Miles taught his successors the meaning of memory," said Holocaust Museum chairman Fred S. Zeidman in a statement. "Those of us who follow in the path he forged owe him a debt of gratitude and bear a tremendous responsibility to carry on his legacy."
For Lerman, memory was a way to lessen the pain of the atrocities he saw and experienced. He and his wife, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, "have constantly talked to one another about that part of our lives, because we believe that brushing it under the carpet would only increase the pain," he told the New York Times in 1993.
Lerman was born in Tomaszow Lubelski, Poland, in 1920, to a prosperous family whose flour mills were seized by the Nazis. As a young man, he dreamed of immigrating to Palestine and living on a kibbutz, but that dream was dashed when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. The Lermans fled east to Lubov, in present-day Ukraine. His mother and several of his siblings died in concentration camps.
Interred in a slave labor camp in 1942, he witnessed unspeakable atrocities, including a Jewish father being forced by the Nazis to choose which of his two sons he himself would have to hang. Recalling the event in the Times article, he described the father, his eyes closed, reaching out and randomly touching one of the boys -- the boy he would kill. The father killed himself the next morning.
Less than a year later, Lerman and three other Jewish prisoners overpowered their guards, killed them with shovels and escaped into the woods. Joining a group of Jewish partisans, he did everything in his power for the next two years to sabotage the Nazi war machine.
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/23/AR2008012302503.html?hpid=artslot
Miles Lerman, 88, who as a young man fought the Nazis in the forests of Poland and who helped found the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as an enduring reminder of the millions who perished, died yesterday at his home in Philadelphia. The cause of death was "multiple complications of aging," his daughter said.
...
The New Jersey businessman also was the force behind the creation of the Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance, dedicated to dispelling the myth that Jews did not resist the Nazis and their collaborators.
"Miles taught his successors the meaning of memory," said Holocaust Museum chairman Fred S. Zeidman in a statement. "Those of us who follow in the path he forged owe him a debt of gratitude and bear a tremendous responsibility to carry on his legacy."
For Lerman, memory was a way to lessen the pain of the atrocities he saw and experienced. He and his wife, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, "have constantly talked to one another about that part of our lives, because we believe that brushing it under the carpet would only increase the pain," he told the New York Times in 1993.
Lerman was born in Tomaszow Lubelski, Poland, in 1920, to a prosperous family whose flour mills were seized by the Nazis. As a young man, he dreamed of immigrating to Palestine and living on a kibbutz, but that dream was dashed when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. The Lermans fled east to Lubov, in present-day Ukraine. His mother and several of his siblings died in concentration camps.
Interred in a slave labor camp in 1942, he witnessed unspeakable atrocities, including a Jewish father being forced by the Nazis to choose which of his two sons he himself would have to hang. Recalling the event in the Times article, he described the father, his eyes closed, reaching out and randomly touching one of the boys -- the boy he would kill. The father killed himself the next morning.
Less than a year later, Lerman and three other Jewish prisoners overpowered their guards, killed them with shovels and escaped into the woods. Joining a group of Jewish partisans, he did everything in his power for the next two years to sabotage the Nazi war machine.