Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day is being observed this weekend. The Wichita Holocaust Commemoration Council presents a program on Tuesday, which will include a special guest. KMUW’s Aileen LeBlanc has the story...
In 1953, Hanna Bloch Kohner appeared on “the most talked about show on television.” She was not an actor or any kind of celebrity. She was a survivor of the Holocaust. Such things weren’t talked about just eight years after World War II. But "This is Your Life" TV host Ralph Edwards did.
And Americans heard some things they had not heard before.
Julie Kohner is Hanna Bloch Kohner’s daughter. When she was quite young, she wondered why she didn’t have any grandparents. Her parents told her in an “age appropriate way” about the horrors that her mother had witnessed and managed to live through. And they showed her the TV program from 1953.
Julie Kohner has made it her mission to tell her mother’s story ever since Hanna Block Kohner's death in 1990. Through her education programs and her talks, she is devoted to the telling of many survivors' Holocaust stories. She has also created “Voices of the Generations.”
“This Is Your Life, Hanna Bloch Kohner” will be at the Metropolitan Complex of Wichita State University on Tuesday, April 29 at 7:00pm.
Public invited, free. For more on the event contact the Mid-Kansas Jewish Federation 686-4741.
For more information on Hanna Bloch Kohner's story, click on the links below:
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
This story originally aired on Morning Edition on April 24, 2014.
