Speakers Bureau Members
Kacrna Saron Khut
Kacrna Saron Khut is a survivor of the Cambodian Killing Fields genocide. He was born in 1970 in a small town called Chongkal, Cambodia. When he was five years old the Khmer Rouge murdered his father and moved his family from town to town. After five hellish years under the communist regime, Saron and his family escaped Cambodia and became refugees in Thailand.
In 1981 Saron and his family immigrated to Portland, Oregon and made America their new home. A graduate of Cleveland High School and Portland State University, Saron is now a restaurant owner. He established the Mekong Bistro in 2012 to stay connected to his Cambodian roots and help foster community in his new home.
Jeff Sprung
Jeff Sprung tells the story of his father and mother who are both Holocaust survivors.
His father, Henry Sprung, was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1920. The Sprungs had a family business and a large family. The family was expelled from Germany in 1938 because they were originally Polish Jews. The family was forced to “sell” their property and business to a German. In 1939, Henry was arrested, and in 1942 he was deported to Auschwitz and selected for forced labor at the IG Farben factory.
Henry survived over six years of imprisonment, forced labor, a death march from Auschwitz, and a death march from Sachsenhausen. He left Europe and arrived in the United States in 1946. Henry passed away in 1968.
Charlotte Levy was born in Aschaffenburg, Germany in 1928. The Levy family was fortunate to receive a sponsorship affidavit from a relative in New York. They left Germany shortly after Kristallnacht and arrived in the United States in December 1938, coming through Ellis Island.
Charlotte and Henry met in a ski club in New York and married in 1954. As the child of two Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the United States, Jeff wants to share their experience and legacy.
Jeff has recently retired from the practice of law in Seattle. He and his family and his mother live in Seattle.
Peggy West
Peggy West tells an unusual story about the Holocaust, her mother, Hanna Maier Barrows, her mother’s family and herself.
Hanna was a 22-year old college student in Germany when she fled to the United States in 1938, becoming a refugee. She had the good fortune to have a family member in the United States who agreed to be her sponsor and save her from the Nazi regime that would have killed her.
During this time, her aunt and uncle, Max and Matilde Maier escaped to Brazil. Hanna adjusted to her new country, continued her education in chemistry, married an American
chemist and had 4 children. She never told them about her Jewish heritage.
Now Peggy, her eldest daughter, will present her discovery at the age of 40 when she visited her aunt in Brazil, and learned that she was Jewish and that her Jewish family had been in Germany for many generations.
Peggy will tell audiences about her several decades of studying her genealogy as she searched for the details of this story and became the person who can now present her German Jewish family going back to the Frankfurt Jewish Quarter in the 15th century. This takes her and her audiences to the escape of her family from Germany, and her current experiences in providing information and artifacts to German exhibits and to US Holocaust historical institutions so that stories of her family are archived and kept alive.
We are proud to have a speaker who has honed her research skills, worked with German scholars and discovered a family and heritage that collided with the Holocaust, but now survives in the knowledge she gathered.
Peggy is now retired and lives in Seattle. She had a long career in social work, mental health and public health.
Steve Ban
Dr. Steve Ban is the son of Noemi Ban. She was a survivor of Auschwitz. 
Noémi Ban was born in Szeged, Hungary, in 1922. She and her family were living in the town of Debrecen when the Nazis invaded Hungary in March 1944. Gradually and systematically, the Nazis deprived Jews of their rights. Noémi's father was sent to serve in a labor battalion forced labor camp. Three months later, the Nazis forced Noémi, her mother, grandmother, sister, and baby brother into a cramped cattle car and deported them to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Upon arriving at Auschwitz on July 1, 1944, Noémi was separated from her family.
After suffering for months, Noémi and 1000 other women were taken to a sub-camp of Buchenwald in Germany called Allendorf. There, they worked as forced laborers at a munitions factory.
As the Allies approached in spring 1945, the Nazis forced the women on a death march. Noémi was one of 12 women who escaped into a nearby forest, where an American soldier serving under General Patton liberated them. After regaining her health, Noémi returned to Debrecen and reunited with her father, the only survivor of her family.
Paul Karemera
In 1959, at a time of political unrest in Rwanda, Paul Karemera’s grandparents on both sides of his family left their homes in Rwanda and became refugees in neighboring Uganda.
They belonged to the Tutsi tribe – the group targeted in the Rwandan genocide. Throughout the 1960s through the early 1990s, tribal tensions flared back in Rwanda. Paul, his siblings, and parents remained refugees in Uganda.
As a young student, Paul was harassed and bullied as an outsider in Uganda, despite having been born there. When civil war and then genocide gripped Rwanda in 1990-1993, Paul’s father was active in transporting soldiers over the border of Uganda into Rwanda. These soldiers were part of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) that fought the genocide’s perpetrators and eventually took over the nation’s government.
At 16, shortly after the genocide against the Tutsi, Paul went back to Rwanda as a “returnee” to the country. Many friends and family had not survived. Paul’s next years involved attending an English language high school and settling into life in Rwanda, which was not easy for him. Nationwide, the genocide’s wounds were still raw. Gacaca courts for restorative
justice were instituted, but many Hutu perpetrators were never apprehended.
Paul has been an English interpreter and travel guide since 2000. In 2009 Paul and his wife, Shelly, founded a travel company, Intore Expeditions, in Rwanda. He now splits time between Seattle and Rwanda. Paul wants students and other audiences in the United States to learn more about Rwandan history and the genocide.