Holocaust Survivor Speaks

 

Holocaust survivor and author Irene Zisblatt will speak at 1 p.m. Thursday about the experiences she chronicled in her recently published autobiography, The Fifth Diamond.

 

As a young prisoner in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, Irene witnessed and experienced unspeakable cruelty and brutality. She was a "guinea pig" for Dr. Josef Mengele, who performed inhumane experiements on her.

 

The last mementoes of her family were the four diamonds given to her by her mother, that she had to keep swallowing over and over so they wouldn't be confiscated.

 

It took Irene fifty years to break free of the terror of her experience and speak about it for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, and in Stephen Speilberg's Oscar-winning documentary, "The Last Days. "

The program is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact the library at 528-5700. Also, click here for The Herald-Dispatch's story about her visit to the city.