In 1939, Armin and Herta Turkl, the parents of ten-year-old Erika and eight-year-old Daisy, placed their beloved girls on a train, filled with other young Czech Jewish children and sent them off to England to escape Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia. The young girls, who spoke no English, were placed in a boarding school and lived in southern England throughout the war. Their parents did not survive Nazi concentration camps.
As young adults, Erika and Daisy were able to relocate to the United States, had jobs, married and raised families. They rarely spoke of their ordeal.
In 1976, Erika's daughter, Karen Kruger, learned a piece of the family history from her great uncle. This began a 45 year journey to uncover her mother's past. In 2002, when her great uncle died, she discovered reams of documents, photographs and 100's of letters. They told the story of life under Nazi occupation and how Armin and Herta tried to escape. They also told of their great sadness of having to give up their two daughters and their hope that they would see them again one day. Karen, a lifelong educator, turned her years of research into a an award winning documentary film Letters from Brno. Along with her curriculum team, Karen has created the LFB Teacher Toolkit for Holocaust education for grades 6th through 12th. This curriculum includes a license for Letters From Brno and detailed lesson plans and teacher guides. It also includes access to the extensive archive of primary sources for both teachers and students. Please help support our outreach efforts to schools, colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad to distribute the film and this essential curricula that teaches the powerful truth, through eyewitness accounts, of a family's Holocaust survival.