Episode 361: Legacy Chronicles with Donna Rosenblum and guest Sharon Feder on hmTv

Episode 361 — Legacy Chronicles

Guest: Sharon Feder | Host: Donna Rosenblum

In this deeply human episode of Legacy Chronicles, Director of Education Donna Rosenblum sits down with second-generation survivor Sharon Feder to explore the extraordinary arc of one woman’s journey — from a 14-year-old Hungarian girl deported to Auschwitz to a resilient mother who rebuilt her life in America.

Sharon shares her mother’s harrowing experiences: deportation, separation from siblings, forced labor, death marches, liberation, displacement, and the painful silence that followed. But she also reveals something unexpected — how her mother’s survival became a blueprint for gratitude, meaning, and choosing kindness over bitterness.

As Sharon reflects on discovering her mother’s full story through Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation testimony, she uncovers how trauma shaped her childhood — and how understanding it transformed her into a storyteller, educator, and bridge-builder for the next generation.

This episode is not just about history — it’s about the legacy of resilience, the cost of silence, the healing power of truth, and the sacred responsibility of remembrance.

A moving conversation about survival, identity, forgiveness, and the profound impact a single story can make on students, families, and the world.

Listen, share, and carry forward the lesson Sharon’s mother lived by:
 Kindness should always be your first choice.

Transcript

Legacy Chronicles – Episode 361

Guest: Sharon Feder
Host: Donna Rosenblum | hmTv / Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center

Donna Rosenblum:
Hello everyone. Welcome to another installment of Legacy Chronicles — Honoring the Past, Preserving the Future. I’m Donna Rosenblum, Director of Education here at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center, and today I am honored to sit with second-generation survivor Sharon Feder, who is here to share insight into her family’s extraordinary journey.
Sharon, thank you so much for being with us.

Sharon Feder:
Thank you for inviting me, Donna.

Donna:
Let’s begin with your mother’s story — her background, her life before the war, and what happened to her when everything changed.

Sharon:
My mom was a survivor of Auschwitz. Her town was deported in 1944 — Hungarian Jews were among the last to be taken. She was 14, the oldest of six children living in a small Carpathian town, middle-class, comfortable, her father owned a fabric shop.
Life felt normal — school, chores, family. And then slowly — the yellow star, restrictions, exclusion from school. She was called out of class with other Jewish children and told she couldn’t return. That moment deeply wounded her.

And then the pace accelerated. My grandfather was taken to forced labor.
 After Passover 1944, notices went up — Jews were ordered to pack a small bundle and assemble in the town square. They were transported in cattle cars — no space, no air, a bucket for a bathroom. People cried, prayed, screamed. One woman died standing.

My mother’s strongest memory is her father praying aloud: “God, please don’t let us disappear from the earth. Give me one survivor.”
 Two days later, they reached Auschwitz.

She remembered the chimneys, red smoke, and a peculiar smell — thinking it must be an odd factory. Of course, she later learned the truth.

At selection, she was separated from her siblings. They were young — they were sent to their deaths that day. She survived because she was deemed fit to work.

She spent about nine months in Auschwitz. As the Russians advanced, the Nazis became desperate. One day she woke up, weighing barely 78 pounds at 15 years old, and was sent on a death march. Eventually she was abandoned in a deserted cement factory, loosely guarded. Then Russian soldiers burst in — one said, in Yiddish, “Are you Jewish? I am too.” He gave the women a horse and wagon and told them to flee.

That was her liberation — bewildering, sudden, terrifying, but freedom nonetheless.

Returning home, she found nothing — her house occupied, her neighbors pushing her away. She ended up in a DP camp in Austria. Eventually, at 18, she immigrated alone to the U.S., sponsored by an uncle who placed her in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She worked in a deli — she cooked — and that’s where she met my father, a Brooklyn college boy who embodied American normalcy. She wanted that life. She rebuilt.

We always joked we were a “mixed marriage” — an American father and a Hungarian “greener.”

Donna:
So growing up, did you feel your mother was different from other mothers?

Sharon:
Yes — but I didn’t understand why for a long time. My father’s family wasn’t welcoming — they saw her as beneath him: no education, no dowry, an accent. So we stayed close to the few relatives on my mother’s side. She rarely talked about her past. We saw the tattoo — A6171 — but if we asked, her answer was always, “Bad people did it.”
“Where are our grandparents?”
“Bad people killed them.”
She didn’t want to talk.

Her story didn’t surface until school — when I was assigned to read Night. I was 12 or 13, sobbing in my room. She picked up the book, glanced at it, and casually said, “That’s my story.” Then walked away.
I realized there was a huge hidden truth she wasn’t ready to share.

Over time, when grandchildren came, she softened. She felt safe. My father urged her: “You owe it to your children to tell your story.” He contacted Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. One day he called me — “Come home. You can hear your mother’s story.” I sat off-camera and listened.

It was the first time I heard everything.

The only way I survived it emotionally was by pretending I was watching a PBS documentary. Suddenly so much of my life made sense — the emotional distance, the lack of expressed affection. She confessed:
 “Anything I ever loved was taken away. I was never going to risk loving anything again.”

Understanding that changed everything for me. My resentment faded. She wasn’t cold — she was protecting herself.

Donna:
And instead of growing bitter, you chose meaning — you volunteer here, you teach her story. Why?

Sharon:
Viktor Frankl. Man’s Search for Meaning. I read it yearly. The line that changed me:
Those who have a why to live can bear almost any how.
That was my mother. She had a why — to survive — and she endured unimaginable suffering.

Frankl taught me you cannot choose what happens to you, but you choose what you take away from it. Being here — speaking, impacting students — gives meaning to her experience and mine.

Donna:
Is sharing this healing for you?

Sharon:
A lot of healing happened together with my mother later in life. My father died young — that was hard — but she lived into her 90s. When she retired to Florida, I visited often — just the two of us — fun, talking, processing.

One day she said, “I am the luckiest woman alive.”
 I asked, “Really? You’re saying that?”
 “God doesn’t owe me anything,” she said. “I had a wonderful marriage, successful children, grandchildren who call me weekly. I am lucky.”

That moment embodied Frankl’s teaching — she chose her attitude. She refused bitterness. Her mantra was,
 Kindness should always be your first choice.

Donna:
And that’s remarkable — because the world doesn’t understand that survivors and 2Gs are often the ones advocating compassion, tolerance, coexistence. They carry the trauma, but they offer an olive branch. That message could have been vengeance — but it isn’t.

Sharon:
Exactly. The life lesson is there — if people choose to accept it. That’s why I come here — sixth, seventh, eighth graders are forming values. If I can impact even one, I’ve done something meaningful.

Donna:
And you do. That is the mission — if survivors and second generation can be good people in spite of it all, then so can everyone.
Sharon, thank you for sharing your mother’s story and your heart. We don’t take this lightly, and we will continue bringing Legacy Chronicles forward — because this lesson matters.

Sharon:
It must not be forgotten. This is our impact — this is meaningful work — and we’re going to do it.

Donna:
Thank you for being with us.

Sharon:
Thank you for having me.

Donna:
To our audience — please like, subscribe, and share. Carry these lessons with you — they may be the most important ones in the world.
Thank you, and have a wonderful day.