Santa Rosa residents Al Batzdorff, Hilde Catz and Hans Cohn will tell their personal stories from the Holocaust in "Remembering the Kindertransport" at 4 p.m., May 16, in Warren Auditorium at Sonoma State University. The free public lecture is the final event of the 23rd annual Holocaust Lecture Series. The theme for this year's series is "Living with Genocide: Past, Present, Future."
Batzdorff and Catz were part of the British Refugee effort which transported 10,000 Jewish children under 17 from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to England by train. Catz was only 14 when she left her hometown in Bavaria. She never saw her parents again. Batzdorff was 16 on Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, which started the Nazi genocide. With help from others, he was able to rescue his entire family.
Cohn was 10 and his brother, Bert, 8 when they left their hometown in Stalsund, Germany and spent two years in France. In 1941, a group of Quakers rescued 200 Jews, including Cohn and Batzdorff. They were sent to Minneapolis, and moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, two years later.
Hilde Catz is a grandmother and former teacher who has lived in Sonoma County for 50 years. Al Batzdorff is a retired mechanical engineer. He and his wife, Susanne - a retired librarian and writer - have lived in Santa Rosa for 23 years. Cohn spent most of the last 30 years in Southern California before moving to Santa Rosa four years ago.
The Holocaust Lecture Series is the only one of its kind in the Western United States. It is a collaboration between the University's School of Social Sciences, Center for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, and Department of Sociology and a community group, The Alliance for the Study of the Holocaust.
The series is presented in conjunction with a course in which students study the nature of hate through a rigorous syllabus designed to educate them about the consequences of allowing the escalation of prejudice to mutate into genocide.
It is the aim of the faculty and ASH to illuminate genocide around the world and to examine the root causes of group and government sponsored hatred.
The speakers in the series comment on an historical litany of genocides; from the Native American experience in California to Armenia in 1915, to the killing fields of Cambodia, from Nazi-dominated Europe to the atrocities committed in Asia during the Second World War, to Rwanda in 1994 and currently, Darfur.
For further information on this event, contact Larry Carr, (707) 569-8879.
