Holocaust Education Month Virtual Program for Descendants
“INSPIRED BY CORRESPONDENCE – LETTERS THAT SURVIVED”
November 13th, 2:00 pm
Program Overview
As we move from the age of witness to the age of memory, CHES is continuously looking for new initiatives to involve the children and grandchildren of survivors in Ottawa’s community. This ongoing process of engagement, conversation, and commemoration is critical to keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive.
Building upon previous workshops offered for descendants of survivors, CHES is proud to feature presentations by renowned Holocaust historian and author, Dr. Deborah Dwork and Rachael Cerrotti, a young author, educator, a documentary producer, and a storyteller.
Dr. Dwork’s career path was influenced by the survival stories of her aunt and uncle. Dr. Dwork’s topic, Holding on Through Letters: Jewish Families during the Holocaust, based on her book Dear Tante Elisabeth (2016) will focus on the ways that Jewish families in Nazi Europe tried to hold onto each other through letters under wartime conditions. Letters, which were censored and often could not be sent between countries at war with each other, somehow became threads stitching loved ones into each other’s constantly changing daily lives. Among her books are Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (1991); Auschwitz, coauthored with Robert van Pelt (1996); Voices and Views: A history of the Holocaust (2002) The Terezin Album of Marianka Zadikow (2008); and In Flight from the Reich (2009).
Rachael Cerrotti is a granddaughter of a survivor from Czechoslovakia. In her presentation, We Share the Same Sky, Rachael Cerrotti will shine a light on her grandmother’s courage and resilience as it reflects in the letters she exchanged with her family in the face of harrowing adversity. Her seven-episode podcast tells the story of Rachael’s decade-long journey to retrace her grandmother’s war story. It was the first ever narrative podcast based on a Holocaust survivor’s testimony.
Dr. Dwork’s Bio
Pathbreaking in her early oral recording of Holocaust child survivors, Dr. Dwork is the Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the Graduate Center – City University of New York. and a leading authority on university education in this field.
As the inaugural Rose Professor of Holocaust History and Founding Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, she created the first doctoral program specifically in Holocaust History and Genocide Studies. She is the recipient of the Annetje Fels-Kupferschmidt Award (2022) and the International Network of Genocide Scholars Lifetime Achievement Award (2020). Dr. Dwork is a Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the USHMM, and (inter alia) a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and an ACLS Fellow. Above all, Professor Dwork is a mentor, committed to training the next generation of Holocaust scholars.
Racheal Cerrotti’s Bio
Rachael Cerrotti is an award-winning author, educator, and documentary producer as well as the inaugural storyteller in residence for USC Shoah Foundation.
For over a decade, she has been retracing her grandmother’s Holocaust survival story and documenting the echoes of WWII. In the fall of 2019, she released her critically acclaimed podcast, titled, We Share the Same Sky.
The podcast is now taught in classrooms, accompanied by educational resources developed by USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness and Echoes & Reflections. Rachael’s memoir, also titled ‘We Share the Same Sky’ is her first book. It won a Maine Literary Award, received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and was listed as one of a “best book of the month” by Apple Books.
