Be an Upstander: The Fred Heyman Story: Screening and Talk

Join us for this documentary screening and talk with Holocaust survivor Fred Heyman and producer Howard Goldberg. Refreshments will be served!

About Fred Heyman
Heyman was born in Berlin, Germany. He is the only male survivor of his family, who resided in the city until the end of 1946 and experienced anti-Semitism and the rise and fall of Nazi Germany while Heyman was a teenager. He managed to survive with the help of a Catholic family. Only about 8,000 Berlin Jews survived the Nazi era out of the 170,000 Jews who populated the city in the 1920s, making up a third of the entire Jewish population of Germany or 4 percent of the city’s population at the time. Only 4,700 were protected from deportation by “mixed marriages” to an “Aryan” partner, like the Heymans. Only 1,900 returned from camps, and an estimated 1,500 survived underground. But once the war was over, only a few wanted to remain in Germany. The Heyman family also decided to emigrate to the United States in 1947. Fred Heyman did not want to talk about his experiences for a long time. But after being approached to share his memories, his current mission emerged: “The opposite of a bystander is an upstander. I want to be an upstander. I want people to be upstanders. In Nazi Germany, most people did not help,” he says.

For more information, contact Maria Ebner at [email protected].

This even is being generously supported by Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill Maura Mast, the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and the Jewish Studies program.