- University News Archive - ��Vlog��ý Little Rock

Holocaust survivor recounts life of hiding during German occupation of the Netherlands

Ajani Oyindamola — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 14:09:20 +0000

Louise Lawrence-Israëls was born in the midst of the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II and spent her early childhood in hiding with her family just five blocks from where Anne Frank hid with her family in the building where Anne’s father worked. “The difference is that I lived, and Anne Frank did not,” said Lawrence-Israëls, a volunteer with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, who spoke in front of a packed crowd on April 2 at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock. The ��Vlog��ý Little Rock Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity hosted her lecture, “Memories of the Holocaust,” in partnership with the Jewish Federation of Arkansas. “I didn’t know my name until I was 3 years old,” Lawrence-Israëls said. “They called me Maria. I didn’t realize until later how amazing my parents really were. With two little children, they decided to do anything in their power to give us a normal upbringing and to save our lives.” A member of the military, Lawrence-Israëls’s father was captured and held as a prisoner of war for six weeks when the Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940. That began five long years of German occupation in which Jewish rights were restricted immediately. “Jews couldn’t walk through a park,” she said. “You couldn’t go to a regular hospital. Jewish children couldn’t go to a public school. Using public transportation was forbidden. Every Jew 6 and older was ordered to wear a yellow star. You couldn’t own property. My father owned a textile company. One day, he came to work and was told this wasn’t his business anymore.” Lawrence-Israëls’s father had the fortitude to gather extra textile and fabrics that he hoped would help his family. In the coming years, her father often traded the materials for much needed food in the family’s time of hiding. It was in 1942, after Lawrence-Israëls’ parents had witnessed their neighbors being hauled off in a truck to be deported to a concentration camp, that they went into hiding in Amsterdam. Lawrence-Israëls’ father had buried anything that associated the family with Judaism and acquired false identification papers for the family.

Louise Lawrence-Israëls spends her second birthday in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1944. Photo courtesy of Louise Lawrence-Israëls.

Lawrence-Israëls, who was just 6 months old at the time, moved with her parents, older brother, and a family friend into a storage attic at the top of an apartment building in Amsterdam. The attic had no kitchen or bathroom, just a small sink and toilet. They lived in hiding for the next three years. The only person who left the attic was Lawrence-Israëls’ father, who went in search of food or news. The family had little food and struggled to keep warm during winters. “The only other people we saw were members of the underground resistance,” Lawrence-Israëls said. “My mother and her friend spent most of the time trying to teach us. When you are a child and you learn what a tree is, you go outside and someone points to a tree. We couldn’t do that. My mom was an artist and would draw everything we learned. I could read before I was 3 because that is all we did.” After Canadian forces liberated Amsterdam in May 1945, Lawrence-Israëls entered a whole new world – going outside. “Going outside was the hardest memory for me. My parents took us outside, and the sunlight blinded us,” she said. “We went across the street to the park, and they told my brother and I to play. We didn’t know what that meant. We wanted to go back to the security of the attic.” Lawrence-Israëls and her family moved to the country and tried to put the nightmare behind them. Her parents had three more children, but Lawrence-Israëls is the only one who practices Judaism. “My parents decided they never wanted anything to do with religion again. Religion was dangerous,” she said. “I told my parents when I was 16 I wanted to learn more about being a Jew. They let me make up my own mind, but my parents were scared for me.” Lawrence-Israëls earned a degree in physical therapy in the Netherlands. She married Sidney Lawrence, an American medical student, in 1965 and moved to the U.S. in 1967. After Lawrence retired from the U.S. military in 1994, they settled in Bethesda, Maryland. It took decades for Lawrence-Israëls to let go of the hatred she felt toward Germans. Her wake-up call, she said, came when she received a call from her daughter’s teacher reporting that her daughter had made some derogatory comments toward German students in school. Lawrence-Israëls realized that she had to work through her anger because she did not want to teach her children to hate. “I finally grew up and realized that hatred breeds hatred, and that is how the Holocaust started,” she said. “We always say that history repeats itself, but people repeat themselves.”

Holocaust survivor to discuss her experiences at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock

Ajani Oyindamola — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 13:52:31 +0000

A Holocaust survivor will speak about her experiences during the Nazi takeover of the Netherlands on Tuesday, April 2, at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The ��Vlog��ý Little Rock Anderson Institute on Race and Ethnicity will host the “Memories of the Holocaust” lecture as part of its “Plain Talk on Race and Ethnicity Lecture Series” in partnership with the Jewish Federation of Arkansas. Louise Lawrence-Israëls will discuss her experiences as a Jewish toddler in the Netherlands during the imposition of anti-Semitic laws by Nazi Germany at 4 p.m. in the Donaldson Student Services Center Auditorium. A question-and-answer session will follow the talk. Lawrence-Israëls was born in Haarlem, the Netherlands, in 1942. German forces invaded the Netherlands in May 1940 and set up a German administration in which Jews were forced to wear a yellow star. By July 1942, Jews from the Netherlands were being deported to the extermination camps at Auschwitz and Sobibor. When her family was ordered to move to Amsterdam in January 1943, Lawrence-Israëls and her family went into hiding to escape deportation. Her father rented a top floor apartment and acquired false identification papers for the family. After Canadian forces liberated Amsterdam in May 1945, Lawrence-Israëls had difficulty adjusting since she had not been outside while her family remained in hiding. Lawrence-Israëls earned a degree in physical therapy in the Netherlands. She married Sidney Lawrence, an American medical student, in 1965 and moved to the U.S. in 1967. After Lawrence retired from the U.S. military in 1994, they settled in Bethesda, Maryland. Lawrence-Israëls is a volunteer at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. For more information, contact the Anderson Institute at 501-569-8932 or race-ethnicity@ualr.edu.

Scholarship named for longtime ��Vlog��ýLR professor Mark Krain

Ajani Oyindamola — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 14:30:04 +0000

Anonymous donation funds endowed scholarship for ��Vlog��ýLR social work students

Mark Krain spent more than four decades as a dedicated college professor teaching students how to prepare for a successful life and career. Now the professor emeritus of social work is being recognized for his lifetime of service with an endowed scholarship named in his honor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. “I feel like a miracle has dropped upon my head,” Krain said. “I can’t deny that it is a very great honor to have a scholarship named after you.” The funds for the scholarship came from a $30,000 anonymous donation to the ��Vlog��ýLR School of Social Work. The scholarship will be awarded annually to an undergraduate student, with a strong academic standing, who is pursuing a Bachelor of Social Work degree at ��Vlog��ýLR. Financial need will be strongly considered. “We are pleased to have the opportunity to honor Dr. Krain’s many contributions to the School of Social Work through the establishment of the Dr. Mark Allen Krain Endowed Scholarship,” said Dr. Ann Bain, dean of the ��Vlog��ýLR College of Education and Health Professions. “Dr. Krain has touched the lives of many students, and it is fitting that he will continue to positively impact students for generations to come through this scholarship.”

Finding a new path

After becoming dissatisfied, Krain left his position as a claims representative for the Social Security Administration office in Queens, New York, to attend graduate school in the Midwest. “My days working in the Social Security office, where I worked hard but it was a daily grind, was a lesson to me. How can you live a life going to work every day where you don’t like what you are doing?” Krain said. He earned a master’s degree in sociology from the University of Michigan and a doctorate of sociology from the University of Minnesota. Krain also completed a National Institute on Aging post-doctoral fellowship in adult development aging at the Midwest Council for Social Research on Aging. In 1971, Krain began his teaching career as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Iowa. After leaving Iowa in 1977, Krain joined ��Vlog��ýLR’s Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Gerontology to be a faculty member in the newly created master’s program in gerontology. The department merged with the School of Social Work in 1994, where Krain continued to work until he retired in 2015, having spent 38 years as a professor at the university. “I thought teaching was God’s gift to the world, making something very complicated understandable to students who would be using that knowledge when they got out to work,” he said. “I never could be a physician, because I couldn’t deal with sick people and blood, but I can teach people things.” Krain and his wife, Doris, live in Little Rock and have two sons, Ben Krain, a photographer at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and Lewis Krain, a psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in North Little Rock. Now that he is retired, Krain spends his days working out at the Little Rock Athletic Club, hanging out with his five grandchildren, and volunteering at the as a consultant on issues concerning the elderly. As for the first person who will receive a scholarship in his name, Krain hopes he or she is a very bright student who wants to help people, a creative thinker, and a problem solver. “I think that it is very important in social work that the person be a high achiever,” he said. “Social workers solve all kinds of problems. I like social workers who get involved. I hope they find someone who will dive into problems and find ways to solve them.”

- University News Archive - ����Vlog��ý Little Rock

Holocaust survivor recounts life of hiding during German occupation of the Netherlands

Holocaust survivor to discuss her experiences at ����Vlog��ý Little Rock

Scholarship named for longtime ����Vlog��ýLR professor Mark Krain

- University News Archive - ��Vlog��ý Little Rock

Holocaust survivor to discuss her experiences at ��Vlog��ý Little Rock

Scholarship named for longtime ��Vlog��ýLR professor Mark Krain