An Evening With Sarah Wildman and Shiri Sandler

July 12, 2021 @ 7:00PM — 8:00PM Eastern Time (US & Canada)

A conversation between Sarah Wildman, author of Paper Love, and Shiri Sandler. Sarah Wildman is an op-ed page editor at the New York Times. She is the co-creator, producer, and host of Foreign Policy’s First Person podcast. Years after her grandparents' had both passed away, Wildman found a cache of letters written to her grandfather in a file labeled “Correspondence: Patients A–G.” What she found inside weren’t dry medical histories; what was written instead opened a path into the destroyed world that was her family’s prewar Vienna. One woman’s letters stood out: these were mailed from the woman in the photo. Her name was Valerie Scheftel—Valy. She was Karl’s lover, who had remained in Europe when he boarded a ship bound for the United States in Hamburg in September 1938. But why had she not left with Karl? And more important, what had happened to her? With the help of the letters Valy had written her grandfather, Wildman started to piece together her story. The letters revealed a woman desperate to escape and still clinging to the memory of a love that defined her years of freedom. Shiri Sandler is the Managing Director of the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village in Rwamagana, Rwanda. Previously, Shiri was the U.S. Director of the Auschwitz Jewish Center at the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. While at the Museum, she led immersive programs on dehumanization and genocide for military students, developed new ethics programs for professional school students, and taught about the Darfur genocide. Prior to joining the Museum, she was the Interim Chief of Staff at the Genocide Intervention Network, a Darfur genocide activism organization founded and staffed by students. Shiri is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.