Fleeing the Nazis: A Journey of Two Sisters and the Hero Who Outwitted the Gestapo 

You’re invited to join us for a special presentation on Monday, August 14, 2023 at The Selfhelp Home…

Recently, Bruce Mainzer decided to better organize the affairs of his 103-year-old mother who had Alzheimer’s. He first looked into a bank safety deposit box which revealed new details about his mother’s escape from Nazi occupied Prague in 1939. Despite his mother’s inability to recall any details of her harrowing trip, Bruce was able to connect the clues from the documents from the safety deposit box with stories from his own family members and information of newly discovered relatives in Israel and the US of the hero who impersonated an embassy employee to fool the Nazis. Bruce’s mother and aunt were the first Jews to try out the forged document scheme and they successfully made it to Paris and then the US. Upon hearing of the two sisters’ successful escape, the hero then used the same methods to eventually obtain passage for thousands of other Jews to escape Prague and flee to British occupied Palestine.