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You should consider Sunday, November 13th.
CenterStage Players to feature a talk back session after the Sunday matinee performance on November 13th. The featured speaker will be holocaust survivor Dr. Henry Fenichel.
Dr. Fenichel was born April 13, 1938 in The Hague, Netherlands. When he was two years old, the Nazis invaded Holland. Henry’s father, Moritz, was arrested and sent first to Mauthausen, then to Auschwitz where he was later killed.
Aware of the danger they were in, Henry’s mother, Pessel, made arrangements for them to go into hiding at a convalescence home. In 1943, Henry and his mother’s Jewish identities were discovered and they were arrested in their hiding place and sent to Westerbork, one of two transit camps in the Netherlands. Henry and his mother spent six months there. They were later transferred in cattle cars to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, the same camp where Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, died.
The conditions in Bergen-Belsen were extremely terrible due to overcrowding, food shortage, and disease. They were later trasnferred to Palestine. Henry spent the rest of his childhood in Palestine, which in 1948, became the state of Israel.
Henry’s mother eventually remarried and together, the family came to the United States in January 1953. Henry went to Brooklyn College where he met his future wife, Diana. He later received a PhD in Physics from Rutgers University and the couple moved to Cincinnati, where Henry taught at the University of Cincinnati for 38 years. They had two daughters and five grandchildren.
Behind the Curtain Cincinnati 