2002 Reunion
In 2002, at a Holocaust Survivors Convention in Chicago IL, we had a glorious conference section for children: “The 2002 International One Thousand Children Conference.” There were about 200 OTC children themselves, some second-generation OTC (children of OTC), some third-generation OTC, and many spouses. Once again, it was Iris Posner and Leonore Moskowitz who made this conference happen.
This conference was very important to all of us. Each of us now realized that we were truly “child survivors of the Holocaust.” Previously, most of us had simply thought of ourselves as individual waifs, the flotsam of the Holocaust. Each of us now had additional identity as an OTCer.
This 2002 Reunion is described in very thorough detail in a long very moving newspaper article “Beyond Hitler's Reach," written by Susan Levine for the Washington Post. That article describes the reunion in great detail. It beautifully presents many stories of individual OTCers, most of them very heart-wrenching, mainly through quotations directly from the OTCers. It gives many other poignant, painful and yet positive remarks made by OTCer reunion attendees, both from interviews or in their reunion presentations. It tells of those few, so happy reunions with an OTCer's parents, in cases where they too escaped and the family was reunited. And it tells the One Thousand Children story itself and of Iris Posner's and Leonore Moskowitz' so thorough work to find the OTCers and to create the 2002 Reunion. Emphatically and triumphantly, it tells this most positive story that brought the OTCers to be "Beyond Hitler's Reach."
Keynote Address
by Judith Baumel-Schwartz, Ph.D. Chair of the Graduate Program in Contemporary Jewry Bar Ilan University