A Memoir of Holocaust Survival in Belgium & a Spotlight on Undergraduate Research

Many Miracles: A Memoir of Holocaust Survival in Belgium available now: www.barnesandn...
UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies
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A Memoir of Holocaust Survival in Belgium &
A Spotlight on Undergraduate Research
Moderator: Sarah Abrevaya Stein (UCLA)
Opening remarks: Janine Zacharia (Stanford)
Personal reflection: Ken Cappell
Student researchers: Maia Gelerter, Gillian Smith, Micaela Esposito, Ann Pei
Cosponsored by
The Stanford Taube Center for Jewish Studies, The UCLA Department of History, and The 1939 Society
The Leve Center celebrates the publication of With Many Miracles: A Memoir of Holocaust Survival in Belgium, by Israel Cappell and co-edited by Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Janine Zacharia, and Netty Gross. On April 27, 1944, Polish-born Israel Cappell was awakened by the dreadful knock on the door that he and his family had feared since they began to hide from the Nazis in their adopted city of Brussels two years earlier. Israel’s sister Fanny managed to flee, one of many consequential miracles that shape this riveting memoir of Holocaust survival. Israel takes the reader on a futile journey of attempted escape after the Nazis’ occupation of Belgium. He narrates the daily challenges of hiding and describes his ultimate incarceration in SS-Sammellager Kazerne Dossin, the Nazis’ transit camp in Belgium. Israel also details the remarkable story of his family’s rescue from deportation to Auschwitz via the Palestine Exchange Lists - a little-known arrangement involving the Nazis, the Red Cross, and the Jewish Agency. Israel’s memoir is among the rare, English-language testimonies of Holocaust survival in Belgium. It is also an extraordinary story of human endurance and survival. This event unites in conversation the book’s editors, Israel Cappell’s son Ken Cappell, who was instrumental in bringing his father’s memoir to print, and three UCLA undergraduates, all Leve Student Fellows, who assisted the book’s production: Michaela Esposito, Maia Gelerter, and Gillian Smith.