News & Events

March 2009

DI Students Meet with Holocaust Survivor

DI Students Meet with Holocaust Survivor

Experiencing important historical events, such as the Holocaust, through the lens of documentary filmmakers is a compelling and thought-provoking component of any documentary history course. But for documentary students the experience was made even more vivid and powerful recently when they heard a first-hand account of history from Holocaust survivor Lisl Schick.

Lisl Schick grew up in Vienna, Austria with her parents (an accountant and a homemaker) and her younger brother. Life as she knew it was shattered on November 9, 1938 when, in one night of terror, Nazi soldiers arrested 25,000 Jews, burned more than 900 synagogues and ransacked Jewish businesses. Kristallnacht or “The Night of Broken Glass” marked the beginning of the Holocaust, during which more than 6-million Jews died.

Schick, who was 10 at the time, and her 7-year-old brother, escaped Austria a short time later on the Kindertransport, an effort by the British government to save 10,000 Jewish children from the tyranny of the Nazis by transporting them via train to England. Ms. Schick talked about the Kindertransport in conjunction with the screening of Mark Harris and Deborah Oppenheimer’s Academy Award-winning film, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport.

Schick now lives in Largo and is very active with the Florida Holocaust Museum. She also has strong ties to UF. Her son is a graduate of the University of Florida and her grandson, Adam, currently attends UF.

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