MURFREESBORO — Her
mother died in a concentration camp, and her father died from injuries fighting
with the French Resistance.
Frances Cutler Hahn, a survivor of the horrors of the Third
Reich, will tell her story at 12:45 p.m. Monday, April 28, which is Holocaust
Remembrance Day, in Room 106 of MTSU’s Paul W. Martin Sr. Honors Building.
The 78-year-old Nashville resident was born in 1936 in
France to Polish parents just before the Nazi occupation of Paris. They put her
in a children’s home at the age of 3 to save her life.
Hahn’s mother was initially taken to Camp Drancy, a
detention camp, and later to Auschwitz, where she was murdered at the age of
28.
Fearing losing his daughter the same way, Hahn’s father
placed her with a Catholic farming family for the duration of the war. He
succumbed to his war injuries in 1946 at the age of 35.
Following the war, Hahn lived in orphanages until the Hebrew
Immigration Aid Society arranged for her transportation to Philadelphia in 1948
at age 10.
Hahn donated her personal collection of documents to the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2013. The collection includes copies of
photographs of her parents, letters to their family in Poland, photographs of
Hahn in wartime children’s homes and postwar orphanages and documents relating
to her emigration to the United States.
This event, which is free and open to the public, is co-sponsored
by MTSU’s Holocaust Studies Program and Jewish and Holocaust Studies Minor. A
searchable campus map with parking details is available at http://tinyurl.com/MTSUParkingMap13-14.
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