Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
By Tom Archdeacon
She was going through the checkout line at a Meijer store a few years ago when she said the young woman bagging her groceries suddenly stopped her and asked:
“You look familiar. Did you come to my school?”
Renate Frydman, surprised by the unexpected recognition, said it was possible: “I’ve visited a lot of schools. Where did you go?”
“Trotwood,” the woman said.
Frydman nodded: “Yes, I was at Trotwood one time.”
That’s when the young woman smiled: “Well, I don’t remember a lot about high school, but I do remember you!”
Frydman is the Miami Valley’s longtime champion of Holocaust remembrance and understanding, plus the application of its enduring tenets in today’s world.
At present, she’s conducting video interviews with four of the last Dayton-area survivors of the Holocaust. Those stories will become part of her project — Faces of the Holocaust — that she began with the help of Wright State University in the mid-1980s and already has collected 15 accounts of survivors, death camp liberators and others.
The interviews are part of the Charles and Renate Educational Resource Center, which is housed in the Dunbar Library at Wright State. The video interviews also can be found on YouTube.
