Jill @ 99.3 - Radio More Like You - Jill @ 99.3

Black River Technical College Foundation's 22nd Annual Holocaust Survivor Series

Wednesday, October 22, at 9:30am & 5:30pm and Thursday, October 23, at 9:30 am in the Randolph County Development Center on the BRTC campus in Pocahontas, Arkansas a free, in-person presentation will be open to the public.

We do ask that everyone please register. To register for BRTC Foundation's Holocaust Survivor Series, you can contact Shawna Lepard, Development Specialist for Institutional Advancement, at 870-248-4026, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., use the registration link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/JHM887K.

Emanuel "Manny" Mandel will be the guest speaker for this year's event. Manny Mandel was seven when the Germans occupied Budapest in March 1944. Manny and his family were among a group of Jews whom Adolf Eichmann offered to trade for Allied material. In exchange for trucks and other goods, some 1600 Hungarian Jews left Hungary by train with the promise that they would be permitted to enter Switzerland. After difficulties in negotiations, Manny and his family were diverted on a train to Bergen-Belsen camp. They were not taken to Switzer land by Nazi transport until late 1944, first to a Red Cross hotel near Montreux and then to a children's home in Heiden. In 1945 Manny and his mother emigrated on a British troop ship to Palestine. He moved to the United States in 1949.

Together, with a continued commitment to education and remembrance, we honor the past while building a more informed and compassionate future.

Manny Mandel - Black River Technical College

Black River Technical College, in cooperation with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, annually hosts the BRTC Holocaust Survivor Series.

This important event brings a survivor of the Holocaust to BRTC’s campus in Pocahontas. Presentations are free and open to the public.

Survivors provide first-hand accounts of their struggles while personally experiencing the atrocities of the Holocaust. Past survivors have been held prisoner in concentration camps, others have been imprisoned in the Ghetto in Warsaw, Poland. Still, others have related their stories of being refugees to countries including France, Switzerland, and the United States.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

You can read more about Emanuel “Manny” Mandel’s Story at USHMM.ORG