Gerda bikales biography of william

It was almost 80 years ago, but Norbert Bikales will never forget the last time he saw his mother and father.

His parents were boarding a train in Berlin destined for a Nazi prison camp in Poland.

“That memory is so seared in my mind,” Bikales said, speaking by phone from New Jersey.

“I was a child, but I understood exactly what was happening. I was left behind, and my parents later were murdered in one of those horrible death camps, factories for murdering people.”

Bikales and his wife, Gerda, will speak about their experiences as Holocaust survivors in four admission-free public programs this week in the Greenville area.

Both will talk about the terror and hatred of the time but also of the kindness of ordinary people who risked their own lives to help Jewish refugees.

A few weeks after his parents were forcibly expelled in 1939, the 10-year-old Bikales left Germany as a part of Kindertransport (German for “children’s transport”), t