Holocaust Survivor to Speak at C.W. Post April 20
Campus Honors Holocaust Remembrance Day

Brookville, NY – Holocaust survivor Sam Sitko, who was featured in the award-winning documentary “Paper Clips,” will lecture at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University on Monday, April 20 in the Patrons Lounge at Tilles Center for the Performing Arts from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Mr. Sitko will tell his harrowing story in recognition of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is observed on April 21.

At 16 years of age, Sam Sitko was taken along with his family to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He watched as his mother and younger brother were taken away from him and later learned of their deaths from a guard who pointed to smoke rising from a crematoria smokestack. Later he watched his father slowly starve to death.

At the camp, Sitko survived many beatings at the hands of Nazi soldiers and spent most of his time performing hard labor in the nearby coal mines. He miraculously survived a very vicious beating near the end of the war and reunited with one surviving brother while recovering in an Allied Forces hospital. Sitko immigrated to the United States and eventually settled on Long Island where he and his wife raised their children.

Sitko was featured in the 2004 Miramax Film “Paper Clips,” which recounts the powerful stories of several Holocaust survivors and a commemoration project they worked on together with a school in Tennessee.

The lecture is sponsored by the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University.

Following Sitko’s lecture at C.W. Post, he will be accompanied to Garden City Middle School by Dr. Thomas Demaria, Director of the C.W. Post Psychological Service Center of the Doctoral Psychology Program. Dr. Demaria recently founded the C.W. Post Community Trauma Response Team to serve New York area residents affected by poverty, violence, homelessness, crime or disaster.

Admission to the lecture is free. For more information, please contact tdemaria@liu.edu.

Posted: April 14, 2009