Holocaust Survivor to Speak at UW |
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Feb. 24, 2005 -- Child Holocaust survivor, Jack Adler of Denver, will speak Wednesday, March 2, at 1 p.m. in the University of Wyoming College of Agriculture auditorium.
He will discuss the atrocities that took place during World War II, which claimed the lives of his immediate family. The presentation is the first of three planned talks this semester in the UW Graduate School's Distinguished Speaker Series.
Adler's family owned and operated a successful textile business in Poland, but everything changed during the first week of September, 1939, when Nazi soldiers marched into and occupied his hometown of Pabianice. Later, his mother and brother died in captivity and in 1944 Adler and his remaining family members, his father and two sisters, were sent to the Auschwitz/Birkenau camp, where his sisters were murdered.
He and his father were selected to work at the Kaufering concentration camp in Germany and then moved to Dachau. Adler was the only member of his immediate family to survive the camps.
At age 16, Adler was liberated on May 1, 1945, and moved to Chicago a year later as a war orphan. He learned English, graduated high school and went to college. He met his future wife in 1952 and they have two children.
He associated with a small group of Jewish refugees in his new home of Skokie, Ill., but rarely discussed his wartime experiences with anyone, including his children. It wasn't until his children had grown and had children of their own that he began to open up about his past.
Adler moved to Denver 10 years ago and speaks about his concentration camp survival to more than 20,000 students each year.
For more information, call Missy Samp, assistant to the Graduate School dean, at (307) 766-3795. Posted on Thursday, February 24, 2005
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