The Secret Story Of A Massapequa Math Teacher, Helen Feder

Massapequa NY

26 January, 2022

8:08 PM

Description

His grandparents were friends with Mrs Feder in Ohio and Long Island. This is to remember her on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Helen was born in Wustensachsen ,Germany but barely spoke about it, even to her family . In speaking about the repercussions of living under Hitler's regime she explained "We lost everything we owned. It cost my father his life. It cost my grandfather his life. It broke apart the entire family and we never lived together as a family anymore, because I was transported to Columbus, Ohio, where I was a foster child" under the kinder transport program. Helen was now aged thirteen and it was 1937. "My sister lived in NYC and had to take care of herself." "My mother struggled, working as a nanny to a Nazi soldier 's children in Germany", to save herself from deportation to a concentration camp. Her father, thinking that they were safe because they were solid and loyal German citizens was killed in the street by Nazis. The kinder transport saved ten thousand children from the Nazi extermination. This effort was funded by American Jews such as Lehman, Goldman and Fabricant. The National Council of Jewish women in America sent women over to Nazi Germany to be chaperones on the trains, out of Germany. Helen states that in Columbus,"I was met by two ladies from the National Council of Jewish Women and they would check on me occasionally to see if I was happy". After war was declared on Germany the FBI visited her foster parent's home in Columbus and handed her a book that she was required to carry because she was an "enemy alien. " I made up my mind that I was only going to speak English. When she decided to be a teacher, she learned that in New York, you could not teach if you had an accent. She took speech lessons, so when she was in New York, people would say "Where do you come from? I hear something in your speech. I would say I come from Ohio. "They would then comment about the midwestern twang.