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About the Author Benjamin Hirsch is a child survivor of the Holocaust who escaped Europe and came to the United States. He was educated in Atlanta, Georgia, and served in the U.S. Army during the Korean Conflict. An award-winning architect, Hirsch and his wife, Jacqueline, have four children and twenty-one grandchildren.
About In Search of Validation In his third and final book, Benjamin "Ben" Hirsch begins his narrative in the mid -1950s upon discharge from U.S. Army service and becoming a Georgia Tech architecture student. In this memoir, Ben chronicles his early apprenticeships and the opening of his first office. He engages the reader in stories surrounding designing and the building of his own unique home, offices and buildings, private and public housing, and a range of places of worship. Through his narrative, Ben provides insight into causes he held dear, including Holocaust remembrance and growing his fledgling synagogue community. His very honest and often humorous approach reveals his innermost thoughts to the reader on his personal and professional life, his family, the value of activism, and his feelings in adult life as a child Holocaust survivor.
About Home Is Where You Find It Shortly after the devastating Kristallnacht in Germany in 1938, author Benjamin Hirsch’s mother sends him and his four older siblings on a Kindertransport to Paris from Frankfurt, Germany. After almost three years of hiding in France, they escape through Spain to Portugal where they board a ship and arrive in the United States on two separate convoys, eventually settling in Atlanta, Georgia. But Hirsch’s parents and his younger siblings are not so fortunate—they perish in Auschwitz at the hands of the Nazis.
Anti-Semitism is at its peak in the United States, and the children must learn to adapt to an America at war. Growing up in the American South as orphaned Jewish emigrants during the 1940s and early 1950s, Hirsch and his four brothers and sisters struggle—each in his or her own way—to hold on to their traditional Jewish values and practices. But in the aftermath of war, the children learn to thrive and excel in their new country.
The prequel to Hirsch’s first book, Hearing a Different Drummer, Home Is Where You Find It poignantly chronicles Hirsch’s journey from the horrors of Nazism to a new life in America.
To learn more about Hearing a Different Drummer: A Holocaust Survivor's Search for Identity, roll over "Books" button at left and click on Hearing a Different Drummer.
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