A Tale of Two Authors

The public is invited to participate in a dialogue between Maria Segal, survivor of the Holocaust from the Warsaw Ghetto, and Dr. Ursula Mahlendorf, UCSB Professor Emerita and former member of Hitler Youth in Germany.
Both authors are active participants in the Portraits of Survival program.
Their recently published memoirs bring us two very different experiences of childhood during World War II.

Discussion/Q & A will follow.

Moderated by Professor Harold Marcuse, UCSB Professor of Modern German History

RSVP: 805-957-1115, E-mail: info@sbjf.org

The memoirs are:

Maria Segal, Maria’s Story: Childhood Memories of the Holocaust (Boehmgroup, 2009, 108 pages)(amazon.com with preview), and

Dr. Ursula Mahlendorf, The Shame of Survival: Working Through a Nazi Childhood (U. Penn. Press, 2009, 344 pages) (amazon.com)

Both authors are active participants in the Santa Barbara Holocaust memory program Portraits of Survival. Their recently published memoirs bring us two very different experiences of childhood during World War II.

Maria Segal was a child when she survived in the Warsaw Ghetto. She was born in Okuniew, Poland, a small town near Warsaw. Maria has three children, six grandchildren, and now lives in Santa Barbara, CA. She volunteers at the Santa Barbara Jewish Federation as a docent for the Portraits of Survival Exhibit and is one of the thirty-seven profiles of Santa Barbara Holocaust survivors in the permanent exhibit. She speaks about her experiences during and after the Holocaust to groups of adults and children, ranging from high school students to law enforcement agencies.

From Publishers Weekly about The Shame of Survival
A former German and women’s studies professor at UC Santa Barbara, Mahlendorf grew up in a small town in Silesia and was a squad leader in the Hitler Youth who embraced Hitler as a father substitute after the death of her own father, a former SS member, in 1935 and also in rebellion against her mother who disapproved of the Nazis. Her escape from a group suicide pact in the wake of Hitler’s suicide was a first step in her denazification and eventual acceptance of her culpability in the Holocaust, an open-ended process that gained a feminist twist as she realized how politics were personal under Nazism. An eye-opening, honest and absorbing account of how evil takes root and flourishes among ordinary people. Illus. (Mar. 28)

hm 5/11/09, 6/2/09