For Sylvia Weiner running is more than a passion; it’s a way of dealing with her traumatic past.
She is a Holocaust survivor, born in Poland, taken from her family at age twelve in 1942 and sent to three concentration camps during the next two years. She went to Majdanek, Auschwitz, and then Bergen-Belsen. In Bergen-Belsen she befriended Anne Frank, and was with her on the day that she died.
She was living in Montreal when she joined a YMHA because membership was required to enroll her daughter in the YMHA’s nursery school. There she took a fitness course which became a running class. Later she joined a small, otherwise-all-male running group called the Wolf Pack after its leader, Wolf Bronet, who was also a Holocaust survivor. Sylvia Weiner was the first woman to ever win the Boston Marathon’s women’s masters division, which she did in 1975, at age 44 with a time of 3:21:38.
| When | to |
| Where | Alvin Sherman Library, Research, and Information Technology Center |
For more information, contact Nora Quinlan, nora@nova.edu or (954) 262-4637.