Dessie Jeffries’ 4th-grade class at the Hawthorne School welcomed Holocaust survivor Jerry Weiser as a guest speaker Feb. 9. Weiser is the grandfather of one of Jeffries’ students. He shared his life’s journey with them virtually, in words and in photographs.
Weiser told the students of the violence perpetrated by Slovak fascists from 1939 until 1944, and later by the invading Nazis. During the Holocaust and World War II, Weiser and his mother, Eva Pomeranz-Weiser, spent years separated from one another. While she was interned in Auschwitz, “Saba Jerry,” as Jeffries’ class calls him, spent years hidden in different countries, with different families, using six different names. Weiser last saw his father when he was three months old.
