Highland Park resident Steve Keller has many questions he’d like to ask his late father, Robert Keller, one of 50 Jewish children who were brought from Austria to America in 1939 as Nazi Germany was ratcheting up the evil apparatus that soon would become the Holocaust.
Keller’s father died 32 years ago in the Chicago area at age 55, and while he didn’t talk much about leaving his family at age 12 and sailing across the Atlantic to America in 1939, he often told his son that he should appreciate his good life in the U.S.
“It’s been a long time since I would have had a conversation with him about it, so now I’m sometimes wondering, did we have conversations about it so long ago I can’t remember all that much, or was I too young to be able ask the really good questions that I would have been able to come up with today?” Keller said.
On Oct. 21 at the Am Shalom Synagogue in Glencoe, the Washington D.C.-based United States Holocaust Memorial Museum held a public screening of the Emmy Award-nominated, hour-long documentary, “50 Children.”