Bernard Offen

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Bernard Offen (* 1929 in Krakow ( Poland )) is a Polish- American survivor of the Holocaust and film producer.

Life

Bernard Offen was born in Kraków-Podgorze, which later became a ghetto . He survived five concentration camps : Plaszow , Julag, Mauthausen , Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau-Kaufering . More than 50 people were murdered in his family; apart from Offen, only his two brothers survived, whom he found in Italy after the war .

After a stay there and five years in Great Britain , the brothers emigrated together to the United States in 1951, where Offen lived in California . As a soldier in the US Army , he took part in the Korean War for a year and a half .

From the beginning of the 1990s, Offen repeatedly returned to Poland to grapple with his own past. He produced four autobiographical films that the Austrian Memorial Service has often shown to school classes in the past. The aim of his work is to remember and come to terms with the time of National Socialism and the genocide of the Jews, for which Offen uses media, lectures and guided tours at the historical scenes of the Holocaust.

In January 1996 the Austrian violinist Herwig Strobl and Bernard Offen met by chance in front of the 1995 restored Izaaka, the Isaak Synagogue in Krakow , whose acoustics are characterized by seven seconds of reverberation. Strobl practiced solo improvisations to melodies by Mordechaj Gebirtig , which he then recorded together with Bernard Offen in the Izaaka. The CD Music in the Izaak Synagogue Cracow was created in Linz with the support of the Upper Austrian. State government.

Movies

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the correspondence with Herwig in: The Isaak Synagogue & the Village Project on HaGalil .
personal data
SURNAME Openly, Bernard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-American persecutees
DATE OF BIRTH 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Krakow