Hirsch Biedermann, born in 1925, was number three on Schindler’s famous list. A native of Lodz, Poland, he endured years of ghettoization, imprisonment, and forced labor before being liberated in 1945. After the war, he left Europe not only with profound trauma but also with a valuable coin collection that his father had buried before deportation.

Growing up in the United States, Hirsch’s son Mark knew little about his father’s ordeal or the hidden coins. It took 20 years of painstaking detective work and the help of his wife, Randi, to uncover his family’s hidden past. This talk highlights the challenge of reconstructing a past that was long buried.

Randi Biederman, a native of Toronto, is the co-author of “Schindler’s Listed: The Search for My Father’s Lost Gold” and a former high school science teacher.

About the Holocaust Living History Workshop

This event is a part of the Holocaust Living History Workshop (HLHW) series, an education and outreach program sponsored by the UC San Diego Library and the Jewish Studies program. It aims to preserve the memories of the victims and survivors of the Holocaust by offering public events involving witnesses, descendants and scholars and through the use of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive. Past HLHW workshops are now part of the Library’s digital collections and can be accessed online.