Peggy WestPeggy West tells an unusual story about the Holocaust, her mother, Hanna Maier Barrows, her mother’s family and herself.

Hanna was a 22-year old college student in Germany when she fled to the United States in 1938, becoming a refugee. She had the good fortune to have a family member in the United States who agreed to be her sponsor and save her from the Nazi regime that would have killed her.

During this time, her aunt and uncle, Max and Matilde Maier escaped to Brazil. Hanna adjusted to her new country, continued her education in chemistry, married an American
chemist and had 4 children. She never told them about her Jewish heritage.

Now Peggy, her eldest daughter, will present her discovery at the age of 40 when she visited her aunt in Brazil, and learned that she was Jewish and that her Jewish family had been in Germany for many generations.

Peggy will tell audiences about her several decades of studying her genealogy as she searched for the details of this story and became the person who can now present her German Jewish family going back to the Frankfurt Jewish Quarter in the 15th century. This takes her and her audiences to the escape of her family from Germany, and her current experiences in providing information and artifacts to German exhibits and to US Holocaust historical institutions so that stories of her family are archived and kept alive.

We are proud to have a speaker who has honed her research skills, worked with German scholars and discovered a family and heritage that collided with the Holocaust, but now survives in the knowledge she gathered.

Peggy is now retired and lives in Seattle. She had a long career in social work, mental health and public health.