Join us on Sunday, May 5th at 1:00 p.m., at Temple B’nai Israel–The Satell Center for Jewish Life on the Eastern Shore, as Marion Ein Lewin recounts the Hess family’s sacrificial love and will to survive the Holocaust. Possibly one of the last living twin survivors from the horrors of what her mother called “a dying hell,” she will describe her experiences in Nazi Germany at that time.
Her story provides a vivid accounting of 6-year-old twins Marion and Stefan Hess, their family’s prosperous pre-war life in Germany, and their desperate ride in a bullet-strafed boxcar through the rubble of the collapsing Third Reich.
Marion and her family were deported from their home in Amsterdam in July 1943, first to Westerbork, a transit detention camp close to the German border, and on February 15, 1944 to the infamous German concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. Marion will recount her personal memories and other historic details that both shape her story and “honor the millions whose lives were so brutally and needlessly ended.” Excerpts from the book Inseparable by Faris Cassel — an award-winning investigative journalist and National Jewish Book Award author — will be read by Marion during her presentation.
When caught in childish mischief, Stefan and Marion ran from SS soldiers, making a game of seeing who could get closest to the guard towers before being warned they would be shot. They witnessed their father being beaten beyond recognition, dodged strafing warplanes, and somehow survived where “the children looked for bread between the corpses.”
“My brother Stefan and I are in all likelihood the last remaining twins to have survived the Holocaust, certainly from Bergen-Belsen. I have always believed our parents’ strength and will to survive was because of their ‘little twins,’ as our fellow prisoners called us.”
Please register for this event including post-program reception at bit.ly/42Bxbiu. Registration will be checked at the door.
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