Chabad plans Holocaust Memorial Evening with guest speaker Norman Frajman
By Betty Nelander
Palm Beach Daily News
Thursday, April 26, 2012
 Norman Frajman Frajman |
Norman Frajman was just a boy when German soldiers forced his family into the Warsaw ghetto. They were then deported to Majdanek, a concentration camp where his mother and little sister were murdered.
“It was an act of Providence that I survived. Nothing else,” says Frajman, who will tell his story Monday at Holocaust Memorial Evening at The Chesterfield as a guest of Chabad of Northern Palm Beach Island.
His talk begins at 7:30 p.m., and the evening will also feature the screening of Unlikely Heroes, which highlights those who exemplified extraordinary courage during the Holocaust.
From Majdanek, Frajman endured Skarzysko, Buchenwald and Schlieben and a death march. He was liberated at 15 and sent to a displaced persons camp in Germany. He still has the gray-and-blue-striped prison uniform he was issued when he was 14.
Now 82, he has watched the number of Holocaust survivors decline, but the importance of bearing witness to these atrocities remains. “We want to leave a seed for the next generation so that this catastrophe doesn’t happen again,” he says. Some young people know nothing about the events, and he see it as his duty to educate them.
Decades after the camps, Frajman returned to Majdanek as a participant in March of the Living, a two-week trip for Jewish teenagers to Poland and Israel in memory of the Holocaust. “It was very difficult,” he says. “I was going there with young people as a witness to the atrocities. That is the aim and purpose for going on the March of the Living.”
Frajman, a former businessman who came to Florida from New York in 1999, has a wife and two children. He also is president of the Child Survivors/Hidden Children of the Holocaust of Palm Beach County and serves on the board of directors of the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center Inc.
In addition to honoring the survivors, Rebbetzin Hindel Levitin says, it’s important to pay tribute to the lost souls. “The ultimate way to perpetuate the memories of the victims of the Holocaust as they look down from heaven is by being their hands, their feet, their mouths and doing a mitzvah, keeping the Torah alive,” she said.
To R.S.V.P. to the event, which includes a buffet dinner ($18), call 659-3884.