Alvernia Magazine Summer 2012

By Lini Kadaba

46 Alvernia University Magazine

old Gernsheimer, a long-time Bernville, Pa., resident who moved a few years ago to The Highlands, a retirement community in Wyomissing, Pa. That’s why the shy, private woman who prefers bridge to public speaking makes a point of telling any takers her story of survival.

“I think it has to be told to make people aware how terrible it is to separate and divide people because of their race, color, religion, whatever. … The story has to be kept alive, because it should never happen again.”

In March, Gernsheimer visited Alvernia as part of its celebration of Women’s History Month. It was an opportunity for the university to honor “a local treasure,” as Vice President for University Life Joseph J. Cicala put it. Her story also serves as a stark reminder — especially to a younger generation — of the evil that can and does flourish so easily, he notes. “Vigilance is 

Photo by Reg Speller/Fox Photos/Getty Images

T

wo numbers are stunning in size — one for its hugeness, the other for its smallness.

By the end of the Holocaust, more than one million Jewish children had perished at the hands of the Nazis. But in the months before World War II broke out, about 10,000 Jews — a number that might seem a pittance — escaped the Third Reich. They were the children of the Kindertransport, a British program that offered refuge from persecution.

Leaving behind parents and siblings, these boys and girls traveled on their own by train and then boat to the shores of England.

Hildegard Simon Gernsheimer was one of them. The Kindertransport saved her life and that of her two older sisters. Thirty-nine of her relatives — including her parents and younger sister — were not so fortunate.

“It was terrible, terrible,” says the 86-year-