Dr. Roger Loria, with his wife Win Loria and Collegiate English teacher Dr. Leah Sievers, spoke to students about surviving the Holocaust.
Photographer Dean Whitbeck shared his portraits of Richmond's Holocaust survivors with students in Literature of Elegy and Redemption.

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English Students Meet Holocaust Survivor, Write His Story for Museum Display

10/14/2016

During this week in which those of the Jewish faith celebrated Yom Kippur, juniors and seniors in Dr. Leah Sievers English class, The Literature of Elegy and Redemption, heard from two guests. Dean Whitbeck is a photographer and the program director at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond and Dr. Roger Loria is a Holocaust survivor and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the VCU School of Medicine.

Mr. Whitbeck’s 2015 exhibition, The Survivors Project, documented Richmond’s 26 remaining Holocaust survivors, including Dr. Loria. Selected portraits from the exhibition are in the permanent collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Virginia Holocaust Museum.

Dr. Loria was 3 weeks old when the Nazis occupied his home city of Antwerp, Belgium. He told the students his gripping story of how he and his mother, Dina Maisel, fled Belgium on foot after the German invasion. (His father, Wolf Loria, who had taken a job in Free France, would evenutally be deported to Birkenau.) Dr. Loria and his mother were caught and interned at several concentration camps, but managed to escape. Returning to Belgium after the war, they learned that Wolf had died, as had much of their extended family. Dr. Loria and his mother immigrated to Israel in 1949, where he served in the Israeli army and studied microbiology. In 1964, he arrived in the U.S. to pursue his doctorate and settled in Richmond.

Dr. Loria credits his mother for keeping him alive. “She brought me into this world and saved me over and over again,” he said.

He says Holocaust survivors often wrestle with the luck involved in the fact that they were spared.

“I try to live with it,” Dr. Loria said. “I put two cents back in the pot and try not to take anything for granted.”

And he continues to tell his story so that these atrocities never happen again.

Students who heard Dr. Loria’s story will use it as it as the basis of a writing assignment due next week. Eventually, their work will serve as the historical companion piece to his portrait hanging in the Virginia Holocaust Museum.

“Many Holocaust survivors have completed oral testimonies, but far fewer have had their stories recorded in writing,” Dr. Sievers said. “Oral testimonies are an invaluable resource, but they can be quite long. Written histories of survivors' experiences are more easily accessible to students and teachers in a museum setting.”

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