Eric Rosenfeld
Presentation Topic: "Holocaust Survivor who served with U.S. military in own German Hometown"

To prepare for this videoconference, we encourage students to view the film documentary, "Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the KinderTransport". Suggested books for students to read include:

* The Abandonment of the Jews by Wyman (details information available to the British and American governments and which was not acted upon)
*Hitler's Willing Executioners by Goldhagen (tells about the total involvement of the German army and police forces (not only the SS) in the Holocaust.
*The Inextinguishable Symphony by Goldsmith (tells how a Jewish musician formed a symphony as ordered by German authorities, how the author survived and went to the USA in June 1941 (on the same ship ERIC came to the USA on).
*Echoes from the Holocaust by Mira Kimmelman.
*Holocaust and other Genocides by Helmut Wanser Smith

Eric was born in Seeheim, a small town south of Frankfurt, Germany. After suffering persecution, he went to Frankfurt into an orphanage to be able to get schooling. Due to the efforts of the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society who facilitated the "Children's Transports", he was able to immigrate to the United States in August 1941. He sailed with 900 other refugees on a converted Portuguese coal ship of 8,000 tons, after traveling by train with seven other teenagers from Berlin to Lisbon, Portugal. This was four months before Pearl Harbor.

In all, about one thousand children were rescued from the threats of Nazi persecution and genocide during the Holocaust. These children were part of one of the most triumphant and tragic stories of the 20th century. These fortunate children were rescued. Yet these 1,000 children were a small number indeed when you consider more than 1.5 million children along with eleven million people perished in the Holocaust.

Eric was sixteen when he arrived. He went to work, moved to Chicago and was drafted into the United States military when he turned eighteen. After seventeen weeks of basic infantry training and upon turning nineteen, he was sent overseas and landed on Omaha Beach in France on August 7, 1944.

Eventually he was asked to join the Army Military Intelligence Service. It turned out that he was in charge of the very area in the town where he was born. He arrested men who had gone to school with him because they lacked discharge papers. He even took the mayor for a ride in his jeep to question him about Eric’s mother. Eric’s mother had been sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in April 1942 where she died. Eric's father had died at home in December 1938.

Eric and Eva met after the war in Rochester, New York where Eva lived with her grandmother. Eric had moved to Rochester in order to run a printing plant. They now have four children and seven grandchildren.

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