A wrenching experience for both West Windsor-Plainsboro South High School student and an elderly Monroe resident.
By: Emily Craighead
WEST WINDSOR In 2045, when Jenna Lichtenstein is 57 years old, she will be the closest the world has to a living record of the Holocaust.
That year she will stand before a public audience and tell the story of how Judith Sherman survived the Holocaust, fulfilling a pledge she made this year to speak on the 100th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps.
Jenna, a West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South junior, is recording Ms. Sherman’s story and writing her biography for the Adopt-a-Survivor program, sponsored by the Second Generation Holocaust Education Fund and the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education.
"It is important to have the background and historical ties to these people and what actually went on," Jenna said. "I wanted to become part of the firsthand experience of getting to know this story."
Over the past several months, Jenna conducted three interviews with Ms. Sherman, a native of the former Czechoslovakia now living in Monroe Township.
Jenna’s mother, Fran, videotapes the interviews in Ms. Sherman’s home where Ms. Sherman and Jenna sit at the kitchen table talking, taking notes and looking over maps of Europe.
Ms. Sherman recounts the terror she lived through beginning when she was 9 years old and awoke in the middle of the night to find a gun pointed at her head. Police were searching for a suspect they believed to be Ms. Sherman’s father.
She survived that episode, life in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and a death march to see the day in 1945 when Russian soldiers liberated her and 3,500 other women from the camp, 60 miles north of Berlin.
"Just hearing from this woman how she and her family had to go through this and what she saw firsthand, and that she’s living a normal life now, it just brings things into proportion," Jenna said.
The most difficult part of the interviews, Jenna said, has been keeping her own emotions in check, to keep from crying as Ms. Sherman described her precarious road to survival.
"When I was 9, I don’t know what I was doing, I was sleeping all the time," Jenna said. "When she was 9, she was running away from people trying to kill her."
Through the interviews, Jenna has come to admire Ms. Sherman’s openness as she speaks about painful memories something she avoided for many years after the war.
"She’s brave just to be able to tell her story," Jenna said. "She seems so normal. You would never think that she ever had to live through something like this."
Jenna’s interest in the Holocaust stems from books she has read about World War II like Lois Lowry’s "Number the Stars" and from her family’s experiences. Several family members survived the Holocaust while other cousins, aunts and uncles perished.
"Whenever it comes up in school it’s a very interesting topic, because my heritage is part of it," she said.
Of course, hearing a survivor’s story firsthand eclipses textbook accounts of the tragedy. The interviews taught Jenna about herself and changed how she views her Jewish identity.
"After hearing this story and seeing how many Jews died really made me proud to be Jewish and to be a minority in this country," she said. "I am here representing these people who aren’t here because they are Jewish."
Jenna and Ms. Sherman will meet for their final interview Saturday, and the project will culminate May 18, when Jenna and Ms. Sherman travel with the Hightstown High School Adopt-a-Survivor organization to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
Beyond that event, Jenna said she hopes to maintain the friendship she has developed with Ms. Sherman over the past several months.
The videotaped interviews and the biography Jenna will write will be preserved for future generations, beyond even that day in 2045, when Jenna will tell the story of how a little girl from the former Czechoslovakia survived the Holocaust.

