Holocaust Survivor to Speak at NMU Commencement

MARQUETTE, Mich.— Erna Blitzer Gorman triumphed over her traumatic childhood as a Holocaust survivor and now shares her experiences and message of tolerance with worldwide audiences. The Bloomfield Hills resident will deliver the keynote address at Northern Michigan University’s mid-year commencement on Saturday, Dec. 11. She will also receive an honorary doctor of education degree. The ceremony will be held at 10:30 a.m. in the NMU Superior Dome. Gorman was born in Metz, France, in 1935. Her family of four was in Poland attending her aunt’s wedding when World War II started. Unable to return to France, they moved to what is now Ukraine to live with relatives. The German occupation followed and Gorman’s father was forced to help bury Jews in mass graves. As ghettos were established and their relatives disappeared, a farmer offered to hide the family in a small hay loft in his barn. There were no windows—only a crack in the roof—and they weren’t able to wash themselves. All became lethargic from not being able to move around. They did not leave the barn for almost two years. To keep his two daughters from going insane, Gorman’s father told them many fairytales. As the Russian Red Army approached in 1944, the farmer carried the members of Gorman’s family—one by one—out of the barn because they couldn’t walk. They crawled toward the Russian soldiers, who helped them into an army truck. When a German airplane fired upon the vehicle, Gorman’s mother was wounded and later died. Gorman, her father and sister stayed at a Russian field hospital and returned to Metz after the war. Gorman was the target of discrimination by her French schoolmates, so her father placed her in a Jewish school. They immigrated to the United States in 1953. Gorman did not speak of her experiences to anyone until the mid-1980s, when she saw Neo-Nazi “skinheads” on a TV newscast saying they wanted to “finish Hitler’s work.” She decided to tell her husband and two children what had happened to her. She has since shared her experiences, framed in the positive context of equality and tolerance, at educational institutions in the United States and overseas. Gorman has participated in the Holocaust education programs at Phelps Middle School in Ishpeming, visited NMU classes and delivered the keynote address at the local Holocaust Memorial Service.