Helen Fagin was born in Radomsko, Poland on February 1, 1922, to a Jewish family of five. She and both her parents, Ewa and Soloman Neimark and her two sisters Wanda and Terry lived above their department store. After high school, Helen attended Poland’s Jagiellonian University in Krakow and recalls that she and the other Jewish students frequently had to stand during class and were not permitted to wear anything with the university’s name emblazoned on it.
She was a second-year student at Jagiellonian University when World War II started. Within a couple of months, German authorities turned the town in which her family lived into a ghetto. While residing in the ghetto, Helen, who was seventeen at the time, established a covert school where she taught her younger sister and other kids whatever she remembered from her education, such as lessons in geography and Latin. While Helen and her two sisters managed to flee during a raid in October 1942, Helen’s parents were taken away. Never again did they see their parents.
After making separate escapes, Helen and her sisters lived under false identification until they were liberated by the Russian Army. After being liberated, and despite speaking little English, Helen arrived in New York in 1946 and formed a family. She went on to earn both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Miami and started teaching in the English program there in 1971.
Helen began incorporating holocaust literature in her class as she believed it helped teach a moral lesson. “I became strongly convinced that the Holocaust could serve as a constructive lesson in teaching personal morality to young men and women”. The University of Miami’s newly established Judaic Studies program now includes the subject.
She continued to advocate for Holocaust education after moving to Sarasota in 1993. In fact, the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg donated about half of the over 1,000 volumes that have been gathered to date to the Helen Fagin collection. In a similar vein, Dr. Fagin and other people have contributed items from their collections to the library, enhancing the Holocaust-related resources that the Cook Library at New College has amassed over the years.
The Dr. Helen N. Fagin Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Collection at the Jane Bancroft-Cook Library at New College are still growing and serving as a resource for the college’s students, staff, and neighbors.
Donations & reservations
The Fagin room can be reserved for occasional small meetings connected with the collection. Please contact libraryadmin@ncf.edu to reserve the room or for more information.Outside donations help fund new acquisitions and support the library collection’s growth into the future. To make a donation online with a credit card, please click here, and select “Dr. Helen N. Fagin Holocaust Collection Fund” from the drop-down menu. You may also send a check, payable to the New College Foundation, noting “Dr. Helen N. Fagin Holocaust Collection Fund” in the memo line. Please send your check to:
Address:
New College Foundation
The Keating Center
5800 Bay Shore Road
Sarasota, FL 34243
Telephone:
941-487-4800
Email:
foundation@ncf.edu
For more information about supporting the collection, call the Foundation at 941-487-4800 or email foundation@ncf.edu . Thank you for your interest.
NCF Holocaust Tribute 