Max Herzel to Speak at Annual Holocaust Remembrance

04/19/2012

The 30th annual Jacksonville State University Holocaust Remembrance will be held April 19, 2012 at 7:30 p.m., Stone Center Theater, Jacksonville State University. This event is free and open to the general public. Keynote speaker will be Holocaust survivor Max Herzel.

Mr. Herzel was born in 1930 in Antwerp, Belgium. After the German invasion of Belgium in 1940 young Max and his family fled to southern France. Upon the invasion of France his family was sent to the internment camp of Agde and then later to Rivesaltes. The family escaped to Marseilles but was soon separated, and Max was sent to several orphanages and eventually to a remote farm in the French Alps. His father died in Buchenwald concentration camp, but Max was eventually reunited with his brother and mother. He immigrated to the United States in 1948, settled in New York, and served in the United States Air Force. He married Cecille Herman in 1955, has two children, and currently resides in Birmingham, where he was an executive with the Veterans Administration Medical Center and a past Lions Club District Governor.

This will be Mr. Herzel's third keynote speech at the JSU Holocaust Remembrance, the last time being in 2002 for the 20th anniversary program.

The Holocaust Remembrance began in 1982 as a project of the JSU Wesley Foundation. Over the years, attendance at the event has grown from a short event attended by 25 people to the current annual programs which often have an attendance of several hundred from the campus and surrounding communities. The annual Holocaust Remembrance is made possible by the JSU Holocaust Remembrance committee in cooperation with the JSU Student Government Association. Faculty, students, and community members participate in order to remember Holocaust victims and in the hope that, through education, an event such as the Holocaust can be prevented from ever happening again.

For more information, please see the Remembrance Committee’s website.