An audience packed Baker University Center Theater to hear the historian daughter of Holocaust survivors speak about her search to understand her lost family's past last night.
Paula S. Fass, the Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley, shared with students and faculty members her work and research of the Jewish Holocaust in a speech based off her recent book Inheriting the Holocaust: A Second-Generation Memoir.
Fass spoke at Ohio University as part of the Lazaroff Lecture series, which is held every year, usually in April. The series is made possible by a request from Leonard Lazaroff, a medical doctor, in memory of his parents, Max and Ida Lazaroff, said Jarrod Tanny, a professor in the Department of History.
Her approach to studying the Holocaust as a historian is different from many other historians in the manner that she uses the memories of her parents, who were Holocaust survivors, to understand their experiences and create a history for herself.
(Fass) was an interesting choice because she is not primarily a Holocaust scholar
Tanny said. Her studies are a quest to learn about her family because much of it was wiped out (during the Holocaust) before she was born.
Much of her information comes from her mother, who insisted on telling her about her experiences during the war and in the concentration camp she was sent to. Fass was born after the Holocaust, and calls her life a lucky accident because both her parents were married and had children before they were sent to the camps.
Fass said she uses her close proximity to the Holocaust to create the idea of her past family as beyond the wall - the figurative wall in her mind separating her family's past by the Holocaust.
Her ideas were very compelling said Matthew Bishop, a sophomore studying history. I really liked the idea about the wall relating to her family's past.
She also spoke about the experiences her parents had after immigrating to the United States and the attitudes directed toward them. She recounted a memory from her childhood about how she felt many people acted as though those who survived or escaped the Holocaust were guilty of something. And though she had trouble talking about her parents' experiences, she felt she couldn't be silent and stay silent.
My mother never stopped talking about her experiences
Fass said. I did.
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