The 19th annual Holocaust Remembrance program will be held on Wednesday, May 9, 2012, at 11:30 am. The theme for this year's program is Witnesses: Speaking Out. Our speakers will be Stefania Kenigswain Sitbon, Gerald Schwab, and Ernst Floeter.
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Stefania Kenigswain Sitbon – Holocaust Survivor Rescued by Warsaw Zoo Administrators Stefania Kenigswain Sitbon,  born in Warsaw, Poland in 1939, is a Jewish woman who was smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto and hidden as a baby in the Warsaw Zoo in 1942 by the Director of the Zoo, Jan Zabinski, and his wife, Antonina. They hid 300 Jewish men, women, and children in animal cages of the zoo throughout the German occupation of Warsaw from 1939 to 1945. Many of the zoo's animals were killed by bombing, shot or taken to the Berlin Zoo and thus, many of the zoo's cages were left empty. Although Stefania, her brother, Moshe, and their parents were there for only a couple of months, being hidden in the Warsaw Zoo enabled the family to survive the war. This rescue effort was immortalized in the 2007 best-selling book The Zookeeper's Wife, which is scheduled to be released as a major motion picture in 2013. Stefania Sitbon and her brother, Moshe, are the only survivors of the Warsaw Zoo rescue effort known to be alive today. |
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Gerald Schwab – Holocaust Survivor; Interpreter and Translator at Nuremberg Gerald Schwab  was born in Freiburg, Germany in 1925 to Jewish parents. Because of the German Nazi government's call for a boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933, David and Paula Schwab, Gerald's parents, moved their family to St. Louis, France. David owned a wholesale plumbing business in Germany and Switzerland. After two years in France, conducting business became difficult since his father was not a French citizen. Thus, the Schwab family moved back to Germany. In November 1938, after Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), Gerald Schwab was kicked out of school and David Schwab was picked up by the Gestapo (German Secret Police) and imprisoned in Dachau concentration camp. Fortunately, David was released two months later. In 1940, the entire Schwab family received their visas and came to the United States. In 1944, Gerald Schwab was sent to Europe and fought under the 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army. In 1946, he was discharged and became a translator of documents and a language interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials. Gerald Schwab is one of the few remaining individuals in the United States alive today who was connected with the Nuremberg Trials. |
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Ernst Floeter – German Witness Who Lived In Nazi Germany Until 1943 Ernst Floeter  was born in 1925 in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland). While growing up, he observed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi takeover of the German government in 1933 and lived under the Nazi regime until 1943. Ernst remembers two Jewish classmates, and his family knew about two concentration camps, Sachausen and Dachau while the Nazi government was in power. Like all German children, Ernst was forced to join the Hitler Youth Corps in 1935. He later witnessed Kristallnacht in 1938 and saw what happened that night and the next morning to the Jewish residents of Stettin. A Jewish family who lived above Ernst and his family were later sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp where they perished except for their one son. After World War II, the neighbor's son immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. |
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Sandra Schulberg – Filmmaker – Introduction of Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today Sandra Schulberg  , who led the team that restored NUREMBERG: ITS LESSON FOR TODAY (1948), will show highlights from the the Schulberg/Waletsky restoration of the film. The film was originally made by Sandra's father, Stuart Schulberg, a Marine Corps officer, for the U.S. Department of War. Ms. Schulberg is a distinguished film producer and former American Playhouse TV executive. She founded the Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) organization of American indie filmmakers and co-founded the distributor First Run Features. Her movie credits include the Oscar-nominated Quills, Sundance-winner Waiting for the Moon, Shadow Magic, Belizaire the Cajun, Northern Lights, and many others. With the Academy Film Archive, Sandra Schulberg preserved 25 Marshall Plan films that have toured the United States and Europe with State Department support. Ms. Schulberg teaches Feature Film Financing at Columbia University. More information about the film can be found at www.nurembergfilm.org. |
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Steve Chenevey – ABC7/WJLA-TV News Anchor – Moderator Steve Chenevey,  our moderator, is an award-winning journalist, with a wealth of journalism experience. Since his arrival in Washington in 2003, he has received two Edward R. Murrow awards, and five awards of the Emmy, including for Best News Anchor in 2010 and 2011. Not content to stay behind the anchor desk, Steve has provided live coverage of many big stories. He is a former sports reporter; his favorite stories include flying with the Blue Angels and playing ball at Nationals Park. Steve started his media career working for many radio stations; before coming to Washington, he working in television in Pittsburgh, Wilkes-Barre, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Youngstown, Ohio. He is a graduate of Clarion University (Magna Cum Laude). |
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Gwendoline Heron Niebergall and Barbara Buttery Bitter – Honored Guests Our honored guests are both British natives who were both members of the staff for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. They were the subject of a story in The Times (London) on May 5, 2012, which tells of their experiences at Nuremberg, and of their lives leading up to that time. The article notes that they will be honored at our program, and also that this will be the first time they have seen each other since the 1940s. Gwendoline Heron Niebergall 
was sent to Nuremberg, Germany, in October 1945 by the British Army's War Crimes Group, to work at the trial to be held there of the major surviving Nazi war criminals. She was assigned to the U.S. prosecution team, where she supervised a staff of thirty that assembled the daily court transcripts. She stayed on for the 12 subsequent trials at Nuremberg and helped assemble the official volume on the Einsatzgruppen Trial, which was, to that time the largest murder trial in history, involving more than a million murders of Jews and others. At Nuremberg, she met her future husband, U.S. Army Lt. Fred Niebergall, a senior figure in the trials, who headed the prosecution's Translation Branch and later was Chief of the Document Division, where he was in charge of the massive collection of captured Axis records that provided the key evidentiary basis for the trials. The Niebergalls later settled in Virginia, where Fred passed away in 1978.
Barbara Buttery Bitter  served during World War II in Britain's Women's Royal Air Force, working at the now-legendary British code-breaking operation at Milton Keynes, where she made important contributions to the successful Allied effort to defeat the Nazis. Both her husband, Laurence Pinion, and her brotherand only sibling, Robert Buttery, were Royal Air Force pilots. Both lost their lives in the war while flying missions over the continent. After the war, Mrs. Bitter was sent by His Majesty's Government to Frankfurt, Germany, to work in the Bombing Survey Office. There, she was recruited by famed prosecutor Telford Taylor to work at the war crimes trial at Nuremberg, where she deployed her fluency in German as a document analyst, analyzing countless captured records that were used at the trials. Barbara Buttery Bitter stayed on for all 12 subsequent trials of Nazi criminals held at Nuremberg. Mrs. Bitter currently lives in Florida.
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| The Quantico Marine Corps Band, established in 1918, is one of the oldest professional musical ensembles in the Marine Corps. They will provide our musical prelude. |
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| On March 30, 2012, John Berry, Director of the Office of Personnel Management sent a memo to the Chief Human Capital Officers of federal agencies explaining the federal government's support of the Holocaust Remembrance program, and “to encourage your continued support, as well as allowing a reasonable amount of time for your employees to attend the event this year” The letter can be viewed or downloaded in PDF format by clicking here. We appreciate the official recognition provided by Director Berry.
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| This program is free, and open to the public. Federal employees and retired employees are especially encouraged to attend. |
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Sponsoring Agencies
The 30 federal agencies listed here provide financial and logistical support for the Holocaust Remembrance program:
Programs and other information from several previous years are available.
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