Holocaust survivor Herb Lewis, grandfather of Danielle Horowitz ’12, will speak at a Yom HaShoah service this evening at 6 p.m. in the Reamer Campus Center Auditorium.
Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, is a day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews who died during World War II as a result of the actions carried out by Nazi Germany. It also honors Jewish resistance and heroism.
Lewis, born Chaim Lazerowitz in 1926 in Wodzislaw, Poland, was sent to a work camp, Skarzysko-Kamienna, at age 15. He never saw his parents or siblings again.
He was an inmate of Skarzysko-Kamienna and the Chenstochova slave labor camps from 1941 to 1945. He was sent to Buchenwald and Flossburg before liberation in April 1945.
After the war, Lewis worked in Germany with the U.S. Army before coming to America and officially enlisting. Later, he went to college, married and owned a bagel bakery in Brooklyn. Now retired, he lives in Cedarhurst, Long Island.