The Sanford High School Civil Rights team will be welcoming Charles Rotmil, a Holocaust Survivor, and he will be sharing his life experiences to all of our students in the Sanford Performing Arts Center Tuesday afternoon. This is an opportunity for our students to hear this first person experience live.
If you would like some information about Mr. Rotmil before his presentation, please see this link: https://www.oralhistoryandfolklife.org/charles-rotmil/
Here is some additional information:
Charles Rotmil was born in Alsace Lorraine in 1932. In 1938, Charles moved with his family to Vienna. Two years later, they escaped to Belgium and then to France, in their attempts to flee the war against the Jews. By 1943, his mother and sister had died in a train crash and his father had been gassed in Auschwitz. Father Bruno Reynders, a Benedictine monk, took Charles and his brother under his wing, along with 400 other children. They lived in hiding, under false names, until the liberation in 1945. In 1946, he arrived in the United States. He spent many years as a schoolteacher and now is a filmmaker living in Maine. Charles has a PowerPoint presentation with historical documents and personal documents.