Along with people from the Gallaudet University community, participants at a conference at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. also included survivors from Budapest, Hungary. Peter Farago, one of the survivors who was 10 years old at that time, recalled his experience of being sent with his mother to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Discussion also covered how the Nazis formulated a policy to create an ‘Aryan master race’ after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 which forced the sterilization, incarceration and murder of disabled persons including Deaf people.

Sign language, voice and oral interpreters were present and presentations were also projected on video screen with captions. The conference was organized by Donna Ryan and John Schuchman of Gallaudet’s history and government departments. Ryan says she knows of 12 Deaf people worldwide who survived the Holocaust and are still alive today. She had learned of the Hungarian survivors through a former Gallaudet student who currently directs the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s office in Hungary. Videotapes of Deaf witnesses and artistic performances expressing the Deaf experience was also shared. Rabbi Fred Friedman, a deaf Orthodox rabbi from Baltimore, MD and himself the son of two Holocaust survivors, led a memorial service to honor the Deaf victims and survivors of the Holocaust in the museum’s Hall of Remembrance on June 22nd.