Emmanuel Thorne, "It Will Yet Be Heard" and Anita & Noel Epstein, "Miracle Child"

Emmanuel Thorne discusses his father Leon Thorne's book, "It Will Yet Be Heard", and Anita Epstein with Noel Epstein discusses her book, "Miracle Child".

Rabbi Leon Thorne was born in Schodnica in Eastern Galicia and was ordained as a rabbi at age nineteen. He became a chaplain in the Polish army in 1944, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1948. His extraordinary memoir, written in part while in hiding in a small underground bunker below a Polish peasant’s pigsty, recounts his harrowing experience during the Holocaust. Part of it was published in 1961 as Out of the Ashes. Back in print after forty years, the original text has been revised, annotated, and expanded to include previously unpublished accounts of Rabbi Thorne’s post-war experiences. Emanuel Thorne, Rabbi Thorne’s son, will discuss his father’s life and legacy.

Anita Epstein, born three years into the Holocaust, is one of its youngest and rarest survivors: just one half of one percent of Jewish children in Poland managed to live through the Nazi era. Epstein owes her survival to her parents’ having hidden her with a Catholic family. Remarkably, her mothersurvived as well, despite having been imprisoned in four concentration camps. In her deeply affecting memoir, Epstein recounts her wartime experience, her miraculous reunion with her mother, and her later life in the U.S., which included auditioning to play Anne Frank in the film. Epstein is joined by her husband and co-author Noel Epstein, former education editor of The Washington Post.

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Produced by Tom Warren