Giles County Public Library

Nashville Ballet's performance is made possible by the Giles County Public Library's Tennessee Arts Commission Touring Arts Grant with grant funds matched by the faculty, staff, and students at Martin Methodist College.

Following the performance, a unique partnership between Nashville Ballet and the Tennessee Holocaust Commission affords the audience the rare opportunity to hear first-hand experiences shared by Holocaust survivors.

"Off in the distance I saw boxcars lined up with hundreds of dead bodies inside. They looked starved and tortured," remembers Jimmy Gentry.

American infantryman Jimmy Gentry had seen combat at the Battle of the Bulge, but it paled in comparison to what he saw that day. "No one told us what we would find. No one explained what our mission was. We saw a wall that was the entrance to a prison camp like I had never seen." That camp was Dachau.

They were told, "Get the guards and get out." Jimmy recalls his horror, "I couldn't move, and though I knew what I had to do, I was numb at the same time." He knew that soldiers died in war "but non-soldiers? Just people? Religious people? I can't understand it. Not then, not now."

When Jimmy returned home, he was determined never to speak about it again. "I kept thinking that if I didn't talk about it, it would go away." But it didn't. And in 1985 Jimmy met a Nashville survivor who convinced him to share his experiences with others. "Talking about it so many years later made such an impact on me," says Jimmy, who wrote a book called An American Life in 2002. "It was all too much. I was a young boy, a simple foot soldier moving from one day to the next. I just wanted to get away from that place, away from smelling death."

Frances Cutler Hahn was just four years old the last time she saw her mother.

It was July 1942.

Within the month, Hahn's mother, a Polish Jew living in Paris, was taken to the infamous concentration camp Auschwitz, never to be heard from again.

At the time, Hahn was living on a farm with a Christian family in the French countryside, hiding from the Nazis.

Her parents took her at the age of three to a Catholic children's home in Paris to be hidden from the genocide. From there, Hahn moved to the farm and after World War II ended up moving from orphanage to orphanage.

"My childhood was chaotic and disconcerting," Hahn wrote in "Children Who Survived the Final Solution." "I did not understand what was happening. Nothing made sense. Except my father, I don't remember any adult taking time to explain to me what was going on and was ahead to happen, to allay my fears and confusion."

Now a resident of Nashville, Hahn, 71, will discuss her experiences as a hidden child during the Holocaust.

Acting as a focal point for the cultural and literary life of Giles County, the Giles County Public Library is dedicated to providing all citizens the best in library and outreach services.