Read reflections and testimonies written by Holocaust survivors in their own words.
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How Did the Holocaust Shape Me as a Jew?
November 1, 2015
I was born in Paris in 1938 to Jewish parents who had emigrated from Turkey in the 1920s, as they no longer felt secure in a new modern nationalist Turkey born from the ashes of the former Ottoman Empire. In Turkey, my parents had been educated in schools from the Alliance Israélite Universelle and were already perfectly fluent in French. At these schools they had received a Jewish education better than I ever received in France in the 1950s. There I only attended public schools. My Jewish education was reduced to bare minimum preparation for my bar mitzvah, which I quickly forgot, as we never went to synagogue afterwards.
