Dan’s Generations Presentation

Dan tells the stories that his father, local survivor Fritz Ottenheimer (z’’l), used to share during the thirty-year period in which Fritz was a Speaker for the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Fritz was an eight-year-old boy living in a town in southern Germany. He and his family were forced to endure increasing anti-Jewish propaganda, discrimination, and persecution; and the family was living in Germany in 1938 during Kristallnacht. Fritz’s father was briefly in a concentration camp; after he was released the family was able to immigrate to the United States. And once Fritz graduated from high school in New York, he returned to Germany in 1945 as a U.S. soldier. View Fritz’s Survivor Archive profile here.

Dan describes what happened to his Dad and his family, and also shares stories about some of the upstanders who helped those who were being persecuted by the Nazis.

Dan does not live in Western Pennsylvania, and so he gives his talk over Zoom (or MS Teams or Google Meet). He shares slides as he speaks, showing maps, family photos, and historical images.

About Dan

Dan was born in Pittsburgh in 1957, and grew up in the nearby borough of Forest Hills (part of the Woodland Hills School District).

Dan left Pittsburgh for Boston Massachusetts in the ‘70s to attend college. He remained in the Boston area, working at several software companies, until he retired in 2016. In 2019, two years after his father passed away, Dan began to speak in the Greater Boston area about his father’s experiences in Germany. Then in 2021, Dan joined the Generations Speaker Bureau at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, speaking via video conferencing to schools and organizations in the Greater Pittsburgh area.