As Holocaust Survivors Fade, a New Generation Keeps Their Stories Alive

“I’m here to tell you a story,” Julie Berman said, standing before a crowd of high school students at the Dallas Holocaust Museum Center for Education and Tolerance.It’s a story she knows better than anyone else, one that’s been studied, practiced and perfected.It’s about two Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust. A man who was enlisted into the military, became a resistance fighter, was shot 13 times by the Nazis and somehow survived. A woman, who was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, then Bergen-Belsen, losing her mother, father and parts of her extended family to the gas chambers.Berman tells this story four to six times per month. But it’s not her story.It’s her parents’.Berman, 63, is a second-generation Holocaust survivor. Her father, Laszlo “Les” Mittelman, died in 1997. Her mother, Magda Mittelman, died in 2014.On Sunday night for the start of Yom Hashoah, Remembrance Day for the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, Berman will once again share some of these stories.She is their closest link, and now, the answer to a growing concern.What’s going to happen when there are no Holocaust survivors left?  Continue reading...