Schindler's Listed

His father was the third person on Oskar Schindler’s list, and his mother was selected as a cook for Dr. Joseph Mengele.

Dr. Mark Biederman is coming to San Mateo to tell his parents’ extraordinary story of surviving the Holocaust, and to share his own story involving his quest to find the gold coins his family had buried in Poland before fleeing the country in WWII.
The presentation will take place in San Mateo and will be suitable for people of all faiths and all ages, including teenagers. This is a special opportunity to hear an account from someone whose life intersected with one of the most compelling figures in our history.

Chabad of the North Peninsula is honored to sponsor the event. Tickets are available at: www.chabadnp.com/schindler

Date: February 23 - 6:00 PM

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A lonely sixth birthday is what provoked Mark Biederman’s commitment to learning as much as possible about the Holocaust.

Biederman is the son of two Holocaust survivors, Harry and Sally (Lipschutz) Biederman, and author of "Schindler’s Listed: The Search for My Father’s Lost Gold," co-written with his wife, Randi Biederman.
The entirety of his parents’ family had been killed in the Holocaust, leaving him with no knowledge of his extended family, where they lived or their experiences before being liberated.
He will be speaking about his book and quest for his families’ secrets. Biederman's parents suffered greatly from post-traumatic stress. His father drank heavily and his mother was under constant psychiatric care, he says, and both refused to speak about the Holocaust.
The book is written about Biederman's journey uncovering his parents’ stories — his mother, a red-headed brave beauty, and his father, a skilful worker who breathed the same air as Hitler and Mussolini.
His mother bravely defied SS officers as they were sorted between death and life at Auschwitz. She saved herself, and Biederman’s grandmother — but ultimately became closely acquainted with the Angel of Death, a man responsible for torturous experiments on children, Josef Mengele.
Biederman's father’s name was third on the famous list of Oskar Schindler — a member of the Nazi Party who is credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews.
These are all stories that Mark and Randi Biederman found through tireless research, trips to Poland and connecting with other survivors, but they are only the few of the many stories that are found in "Schindler’s Listed: The Search for My Father’s Lost Gold."
Annihilation by fire
It was his sixth birthday when he questioned why he didn’t have aunts, uncles and grandparents at his party like other kids his age. His mother replied with a quick answer.
“They were all killed by Germans.”
“It shocked me — killed by the Germans? What does that mean?” Biederman said. “Who wants to kill grandparents, aunts, and uncles?”
Biederman was young and carried on with boyhood things, not dwelling too much on what his parents let slip out.
He later stumbled upon a valuable coin he pocketed to show his father.
“(My father) was a hardworking guy — stressed from business — so he says, ‘don’t bother me with that nonsense, you know we had a really nice coin collection that we had to leave behind, buried in the yard, when the Germans came and kicked us out of our home,'” Biederman recalled.
Biederman could not get an answer from his parents about the Germans they spoke of, so he turned to his school teacher.
She told him to look up Holocaust in the dictionary.
“I looked it up and back then in 1970, the dictionary definition just said total annihilation by fire,” Biederman said. “I didn’t know what this meant … but it sounded like something I had to know.”
Found and lost
Biederman spent 20 years searching for his family’s coins, and found them — but laws in Poland stipulated that whatever is found in the ground belongs to the Polish government.
The gold coins are now an exhibit in a museum in Poland, with no recognition of his family or his near-impossible search to find them.
“I’ve actually thought of ways of securing these coins. I’ve thought about stealing them,” Biederman said.
“So, Book 2 will be how I get the coins.”
In 2018, the Anti-Defamation League put off a global poll that surveyed more than 53,000 people. The survey found, “35 per cent of people surveyed did not know what the Holocaust was.”
Biederman hopes to start speaking in schools to educate children about the Holocaust.
“It’s one of those things that they say, if you don’t learn from history then you are doomed to repeat it,” Randi Biederman said. “I think it’s a very important lesson in history, the fact that all these families were ripped apart.”
Mark Biederman chose the publisher of the book, Academic Studies Press, because it often prints school textbooks, and he hopes he can get the book into schools eventually.
“People used to laugh when my father would say, 'It can happen again,' because people could never believe that it could have happened in Germany,” Biederman said. “My father was always waiting for the shoe to drop.”
Mark and Randi Biederman both hope to see the book in video format someday.
“I would think that somebody like Steven Spielberg, who did 'Schindler’s List,' (would see it as) a natural sequel,” Biederman said.