Doris Fedrid

Doris Fedrid

(Doris (center) and her Husband, Fred (far right), pictured in the front row of an English Class offered by the Hebrew Society for the Deaf sometime before 1963.)

Doris Fedrid was June 26, 1927, in Tarnopol, Poland (Present Day: Ternopil, Ukraine.)

She was born to a Jewish Family and was Deaf.

At 7 years old she went to live at a Jewish School for the Deaf in Lwów, Poland (Present-Day: Lviv, Ukraine.)

She described the School in the following way: “It was all lip reading … if they caught us signing, they would hit our hands with wood, or they'd tie our hands behind our back.”

When the Germans invaded her area of Poland in June 1941 (which had been occupied by the Soviets from September 1939 until June 1941) 14 year old Doris and her Family were imprisoned in the Tarnopol Ghetto (Polish: (Polish: getto w Tarnopolu, German: Ghetto Tarnopol.)

18,600 Jewish Men, Women and Children were forced into the Tarnopol Ghetto.

Jews from other, smaller Ghettoes were then sent into the Tarnopol Ghetto where 20,000 were murdered inside the Ghetto and at the Belzec Death Camp (124 miles away.)

Being Deaf, Doris had to work extra hard to understand the German Guards and the ever changing rules in the Ghetto otherwise it meant death.

In June 1943 Doris escaped from the Tarnopol Ghetto and went into hiding and survived the War.

In 1945 she learned that her Parents and Sister, Esther, had also survived.

The Family moved to New York in January 1947.

Doris found a vibrant Deaf Community and began to learn American Sign Language.

She met Fred Fedrid at an American Citizenship Class for Deaf Immigrants and they married.

He was also a Deaf Holocaust Survivor.

Fred died in 1963.

Doris Fedrid died on May 17, 2014.

She was 86 years old.

16,000 Non-Jewish Deaf People were murdered by the Germans under their T4 Program (the Mass Murder of the Mentally and Physically Disabled in Germany and Austria) from 1939-1945.

17,000 Non-Jewish Deaf People were Forcibly Sterilized by the Germans under their T4 Program) in Germany and Austria from 1939-1945.

25,000 Jewish Deaf People were murdered by the Germans during the War simply for being Deaf (being Jewish was secondary.)

An Unknown Number of Jewish Deaf People from across German-Occupied Europe were murdered for simply being Jewish and are included in the 6 Million Jews murdered by the Germans from 1933-1945.