Educator to share story of family’s escape from Nazi Germany

Burbank educator and poet David Meyerhof will tell the story of his family’s escape from Nazi Germany to survive the Holocaust during a presentation at a local temple on Sunday.

Varian Fry — known as “the American Schindler” for helping roughly 2,000 people escape Nazi Germany and occupied France, including many intellectuals and artists — helped Meyerhof’s father and grandparents. Meyerhof’s grandfather, Otto Meyerhof, won the 1922 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for discovering how sugar is converted into energy in the human body.

Meyerhof’s mother escaped from Berlin through the Kindertransport rescue mission, which helped 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, flee the Nazis in Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and what is now Poland during the nine months leading up to World War II.

She later worked in Anna Freud’s Hampstead War Nursery in London during World War II.

The presentation will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday at Burbank Temple Emanu El, located at 1302 N. Glenoaks Blvd., and will include a reading of poems from Meyerhof’s book “Look Beyond.” A book signing will follow.

For more information, call (818) 261-2060 or email meyerhof.david@yahoo.com.