Oakton highlights Rumbula massacre, Nazis in fiction

Jewish Studies at Oakton is making two free presentations that shed light on the massacre of Jews in the Baltics and the use of Nazi figures in literature at the college’s Skokie campus, 7701 N. Lincoln Ave. “Rumbula’s Echo: An Incredible Story of Holocaust Survival” at 11 a.m. Thursday, Nov. 21, (Rooms A145/152), traces the two-day massacre of more than a third of the Jewish population in Latvia in 1941. Director Mitchell Lieber will introduce excerpts and there will be a question-and-answer session with Sia Hertsberg, a massacre survivor. Although the film is still a work in progress, “Rumbula’s Echo” already has received acclaim at screenings in Chicago, Germany, Israel, Latvia, New York, and Washington, D.C., as well as from genocide, Holocaust, and film experts. In the second event, “Nazis Gone Mad! Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann in American Fiction,” Danielle Christmas, a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago, explores the genesis of this literary model through the lens of Robert Shaw’s “The Man in the Glass Booth” and Ira Levin’s “The Boys from Brazil” which use characters based on Hitler and Holocaust mastermind Adolf Eichmann. For more information, contact Wendy Maier-Sarti, Oakton professor of history and coordinator of Jewish Studies, at (847) 635-1458 or jewishstudies@oakton.edu