Growing Up As A Jew in London, England during World War II
Come for a British Tea and Talk by FJC Member Joan Burstyn
Thursday, August 10 at 3:30 p.m.
We’ll serve tea and treats to honor Joan’s British heritage
On August 10, 2017 at 3.30 p.m. FJC member Joan Burstyn will give a presentation titled “Growing Up in London, England during World War II.”
As Joan ages, she realizes she has an important story to tell. Her parents had both been born in England during the first decade of the twentieth century, but when war broke out in Europe in 1939 her mother’s father still had a sister living in Poland, and cousins of her father lived in Germany. Joan will use photographs, newspaper articles, as well as her own poems and excerpts from her diary for 1944-45 to explore the effects of the war on her life. By focusing particularly on the effects of German air attacks on London in the Fall of 1940 and again during the Summer of 1944, Joan will examine ways that military warfare changed during that time, and the effects of those changes on herself and other unarmed British citizens. She will also discuss her family’s reactions to the persecution of Jews by the Nazis, and the effect on her, as a teen age Jew, of the revelations in 1944 of massacres in the concentration camps.