Dr. Victor Borden, a retired obstetrician and gynecologist from Bergen County, Thursday, April 25 at 12 p.m. in the H-wing Auditorium (H-129) at Ramapo College of New Jersey will recount how his parents escaped the Holocaust in a presentation with the title, “Flight from German Oppression:Lodz, Arkhangelsk, Teheran, Tel-Aviv, & Paterson.”  The program will be presented under the auspices of the Gross Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and is free and open to the public.

With only approximately 10% of Polish Jews having survived the Holocaust (around 330,000 people), the vast majority did so by escaping to the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R.  provided a refuge that may have been inadvertent and involuntary, and conditions were extremely harsh for those who endured them. For example, by deporting Victor Borden’s parents and other members of his family to a slave labor camp near Arkhangelsk (Archangel in English) in the Russian frozen north, the Soviet authorities saved their lives. How they fared in captivity and eventually ended up in Iran and pre-independence Israel forms the rest of Dr. Borden’s remarkable story of survival.