Friday, November 17
2:00pm-3:00 pm
CVWLLPL
Presentation is free and open to the general public.
Dana Fast’s story is of her incredible childhood experiences-life among the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, studying at a forbidden secret school there, escape to relatives, and in hiding passing as a Catholic girl in the countryside, under a new identity.
In 1943, the German occupiers systematically demolished Warsaw, leaving the entire city in rubble. But not before compelling some 400,000 or more Jews from throughout Poland to move into the Warsaw Ghetto, confining them to a living space that was clearly meant to degrade and diminish them. About 100,000 Ghetto inmates died from starvation. The rest – about 300,000 – were deported to Treblinka and other death camps.
But for the courage of Dana Fast’s parents, she would have been among the victims. Smuggled out of the ghetto in the summer of 1942, 11-year-old Dana had to rely on an inner strength and ingenuity to survive the next two years until the Nazis were defeated. Dana tells a nearly unbelievable story of how she was able to stay hidden, sometimes in plain sight, by taking on a new identity as a Catholic child.
Dana is now retired and lives in Lake Clear, New York. After the war, she graduated with a degree in Chemistry from Warsaw Polytechnic. She moved to Israel in 1962, then came to the US in 1964 and to the Adirondacks ten years later. There, Dana worked in Medical Research for the Trudeau Institute and the Walton A. Jones Cell Science Center until her retirement. After that, she worked tirelessly in the community, as a volunteer at the Paul Smith’s Visitor Interpretive Center, the Saranac Lake Free Library, the Village Improvement Society in Saranac Lake, and as a Master Gardener Volunteer through the Cornell Cooperative Extension. An avid hiker, she is an Adirondack Forty-Sixer. She and her daughter Yvona hiked across England in 2000