Events
My Holocaust Story: Reflections of a Hidden Child
Date and Time
Monday, November 2, 2015 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Description
Fred Lessing is a Hiddent Child survivor of the Holocaust. He was four-years old when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, the youngest son of highly assimilated Jewish parents. He and his family were living in Delft when in October of 1942 they were ordered to prepare for deportation.
Like so many other Dutch Jews, the Lessings were law-abiding and ready to obey the Germans. Only the arrival of Fred's grandfather from Amsterdam, who warned that they should not go on the transport, saved them from sharing the fate of the 75% of Jews from the Netherlands who perished in the Holocaust.
From the moment in 1942, Fred's typically Dutch childhood gave way to a life of hiding and camouflage, to a world in which even a young boy understood the daily deceptions.
On November 2, 2015, at 4:00 pm, Fred Lessing will present "My Holocaust Story: Reflections of a Hidden Child." Besides recounting his two and a half years in hiding. particularly the heroic efforts of his parents, Lessing will reflect upon his own efforts as an adult to face his Holocaust past.
Fred Lessing immigrated to the U.S. in 1948, attended public schools in Springfield, Massachusetts, where his family settled, and completed his high school education at the Putney School in Vermont. He earned a B.A. degree from Carleton College (1958) and a Ph. D. degree in philosophy from Yale University (1962). He was an Associate professor of philosophy at Oakland University in Michigan from 1962-1973, at which time he changed careers to become a psychotherapist in private practice, a profession from which he retired in May of 2014. He holds a M.A. degree in clinical psychology from the Michigan School of Professional Psychology and worked, as he likes to put it, "with wounded children of all ages and backgrounds." Fred has been a speaker at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan for about 25 years and, together with his wife Rosalyn, also a psychotherapist, a frequent leader of workshops and seminars at the annual conferences of the World Federation of Child Survivors of the Holocaust. They have four children and six grandchildren and one more due in January.
Contact
Please contact Professor Rob Franciosi at [email protected] or 616-331-3069 for more information.