The first group gasp came when Marion Sacher told
about her childhood in the Third Reich. Sacher, a refugee from Nazi Germany, is a resident of the Kittay House independent living seniors apartment building in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. She and a Holocaust survivor who lives there were talking about their wartime experiences one morning last week in the building’s auditorium. In the seats around them were 20 fifth graders, all girls, from PS 75X public school in the South Bronx and a handful of school staff and Kittay House residents.
Naomi Chiel, Jewish program coordinator at Kittay House, asked Sacher how old she was when the Nazi restrictions first affected her life.
“I was 10 years old,” Sacher answered.
All the girls gasped. Sacher was their age when the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws kept her and her fellow German Jews from sitting on public benches, playing in public parks or doing the things that other Germans were able to do.
The girls from PS 75X, a 40-minute school bus ride away from Kittay House, are all 10, 11 or 12 years old. They already knew the outlines of Sacher’s former life in Europe, and of Czechoslovakia-born Pearl Brown’s — their stories were the subject of a Yom HaShoah story, “Terror and Tears,” in the Daily News a few weeks ago.
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