Lisl Bogart – who survived four years of detainment in a Nazi concentration camp – will tell her harrowing story during a 30-minute program titled “A Survivor’s Story: Lisl Bogart” during September on RSU Public Television.
The program is based on a public lecture presented by Mrs. Bogart in April on the Rogers State University campus in Claremore. The lecture was part of a year-long series of events to commemorate the RSU Centennial.
“We are pleased to present this important and compelling survivor’s story on RSU Public Television,” said Dan Schiedel, general manager of the station, which is operated by Rogers State University.
The program will air at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 1; 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 2; 9 a.m. Monday, Sept. 7; 10:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 10; 9 a.m. Tuesday, Sept. 15; 9 a.m. Wednesday, Sept. 23; and 9 a.m. Friday, Sept. 25.
Bogart was born in Prague, in what is now the Czech Republic. After the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, her father lost his business. The young Lisl, along with her brother and parents, were deported in 1942 to the concentration camp known as Terezin in Germany.
During this time her parents and brother were sent on a cattle car to Auschwitz, which was the last time Lisl saw them. They were part of the extermination program in Auschwitz. Lisl was liberated by the Russian Army on May 7, 1945 and is the only survivor in her family, losing 43 family members.
She arrived in New York City in 1946, and lived with her uncle’s family. There she met Hank Bogart, whom she married and had two daughters and several grandchildren.
The couple moved to the Chicago suburb Northbrook. In the 1970s they became founding members of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation in Skokie. Lisl was a board member as well as an executive board member and formed the Foundation’s Speakers bureau. She was also a member of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Chicago Office Speaker’s Bureau.
Lisl has been in several of Chicago area schools to tell her story through the years. She has had an annual engagement every year at the Belvidere High School since 1988. Hank and Lisl moved to Florida in 1999 but return to the Chicago annually to speak at area schools.
For more information, contact RSU Public Television at (918) 343-7657.