Curtis Sittenfeld was only seven years old when the Holocaust first began to leave its destructive mark on history. Now a father, grandfather, accomplished businessman and war veteran, Sittenfeld accounted his harrowing past on how he became a Holocaust survivor.
After his father was arrested on November 9th, 1938, the night now known as “The Night of The Broken Glass,” Sittenfeld and his family contemplated the idea of leaving France in order to evade Hitler’s exceedingly horrendous acts against the Jewish population. While Sittenfeld’s immediate family entertained the idea of leaving, his extended family believed the tensions would soon die down.
Of those who stayed behind in France was Sittenfeld’s uncle, “who had been a World War I hero and wore a medal, The Iron Cross, for his heroism on behalf of Germany.” With the belief that Germany would not fail
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While French is his native language, Sittenfeld was able to learn German by the age of seven, Spanish around the age of thirteen and English by the time he was graduating high school. His ability to pick up on multiple languages so quickly can be attributed to the nature versus nurture interactions. These interactions state that up until the age of twelve learning languages will come more easily than to an adult. After the age of twelve, learning new languages becomes more difficult even through imitation and reinforcement.
By the time Sittenfeld was twelve, he had already known French, German and Spanish. He was able to learn these languages through imitation, reinforcement and shaping, though rather than being rewarded, Sittenfeld had to learn new languages for survival. Sittenfeld also stated that he found it was easier to speak German than to speak Spanish. This could be directly contributed to the fact that Sittenfeld learned German in a classroom setting, whereas he learned Spanish for survival on his