Mr. Vern Gideon, a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, was the guest speaker at our weekly meeting of February 26. He brought us back to 1939 faithful events that speared him and his family from the German Nazis.

 

At the time Vern was about three years old, living with his family in Villingen-Schwenningen, a good size town not far from Stuttgart Germany. He said that they had very nice gentile neighbors who helped them hide from the Nazis everytime they went searching for Jews. This one time, Vern said,  his father got caught by the Nazis, and was ready to be dispatched to the concentration camp in Dachau. But thanks to his uncle, (his father's brother) a German officer in the 1915 war, who was able to falsify documents, Vern's dad miraculously was sent back home.

 

Vernon said that to get the kids out of harm's way, his family was able to sent them across the border in Switzerland, not too far away from their town. He said that over a period of six months the kids and their family would meet every week at the border to see each other and wave hello across the fence. That same year in 1939, with the help of Vern's uncle and by the grace of God, the whole Gideon family was able to come to the United Stated of America.