Nina Morecki has been speaking about her odyssey of survival under Nazi occupation to middle school, high school, college and other public audiences since the late 1980s. She spoke to several of Prof. Marcuse's lecture and seminar courses as well. In early 1998 Prof. Marcuse began a project to videotape Nina telling her life story. By June 1999, about 8 hours of video cover the time from Nina's early childhood in 1920s Lvov, Poland, to her first postwar jobs in New York City.
In the fall of 1998 Nina's friend Alice helped her write a 15 page "letter to young people" about her experiences during the Nazi holocaust. That letter is the basis for this web page. Prof. Marcuse's students have found some maps to add to the site. Based on the videotapes they are also preparing short texts that go into greater detail about specific events than the letter. These will be added as links soon, as will a chronology and a family tree.
Ultimately, we hope to add short viewable videotape segments (in Quicktime format) that our internet audience can watch on-screen. These will include a series of questions Nina answered in one of Prof. Marcuse's seminars.
Also, we plan on adding several aids for teachers who invite Nina to speak to their classes. A preliminary bibliography is already available, but we will also have printable versions of Nina's letter and some of the maps, as well as suggested activities.
If you are interested in listening to some testimony by Holocaust survivors that is available on the internet, please try Prof. Bolkowsky's site at the University of Michigan Dearborn.
If you used this site, or if you have comments or questions, Prof. Marcuse would love to hear from you: marcuse@humanitas.ucsb.edu.