Pollinator Paradise

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Saturday, April 29, 11-12:30pm FREE now struggles to walk. Legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg even interviewed him for research in 1996.

“As he’s gotten older, this is what he really enjoys doing — telling his story because he feels it’s so important that it needs to be told,” says his longtime companion Sarah Yarrin. “How much of it do you get in a history book? I don’t know. But this is someone who lived it.”

Repp doesn’t hesitate to share the most painful details etched into his memory. His voice has the same intensity as if he’s telling the story for the first time. The Nazis pulled out every tooth in his mouth with a pair of rusty pliers for one gold filling. With no water, he used his own urine to rinse his mouth. Soldiers forced prisoners to set bodies on fire, even when many hadn’t taken their last breath.

The details are gruesome, but they were a harsh reality for Repp. His fearlessness and candid manner of speaking struck Rabbi Dan Lewin, a Preston Hollow writer and adjunct professor at the

University of North Texas. He’s devoted his time to writing Repp’s memoir, he says, to preserve the parts of Repp’s life that aren’t encapsulated in a one-hour lecture. Lewin believes the first-person account will have the greatest impact.

“When people speak about the Holocaust, it’s very removed,” Lewin says. “You see terrible pictures and videos and skeletons and bodies and evil faces. You say, ‘Oh, how terrible this is,’ but then you snap back into your life.”

Armed with several questions each week, Lewin sits with Repp in his living room for hours at a time. He plans to complete the memoir by May 1, the day Repp remembers being liberated 72 years ago.

“Lately, talking about all this has brought it all back in his mind,” Yarrin says, adding that she recently caught him tapping a beat on his leg, something he did in the camps to pass time.

Surviving the Holocaust shaped the rest of Repp’s life. He knows he’s become different from most.

At his South Dallas department store, which he ran for 44 years, he refused to install separate doors for blacks and whites during the Jim Crow era. If customers didn’t like it, they knew where to exit, Repp says. He never called police when he caught a shoplifter and gave clothes to families who couldn’t afford them at a discounted rate.

“From what I survived, how can I take a person and put a label on them for the rest of his life?”