The Howard County
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F O C U S
VOL.2, NO.1
F O R
P E O P L E
OV E R
More than 30,000 readers throughout Howard County
Paying a debt back with passion
The kindness of strangers Fein and his sister survived because they were placed with the Bocahuts, a family of farmers who lived 20 miles outside of Paris. Suzanne and Marcel Bocahut had four children of their own. They protected other Jewish children besides Fein and his sister, all of whom were hidden in plain sight, going about their activities inside and outside the house. For added cover, Fein was baptized. Fein has vague memories of that time. He doesn’t remember his father and has just a memory or two of visits from his mother before her deportation. After the war, an uncle who survived arranged for the OSE to place him and his sister in an orphanage, where they first learned they were Jews.
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PHOTO BY R. SCOTT KRAMER
By Robert Friedman When asked why he is involved in so many volunteer endeavors, Howard County’s 2011 Volunteer of the Year, Jacques Fein, replies simply, “I was saved by strangers. I am forever grateful.” A resident of Elkridge since 1970, and now 73 years old, Fein spent much of his early childhood hiding from the Nazis in France. His parents, Rojza and Szmul Karpik, had immigrated to France from Poland in the 1930s to escape the anti-Semitism there. His father made a modest living in France as a tailor, and Jacques was born there in 1938. But after the Nazi army invaded France in 1940, the Karpiks sensed the rising danger to their young family. So little Jacques, then 3, and his one-year-old sister Annette were placed with a Catholic French family through the services of the Oevres de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) — the Society for the Rescue of Children, which worked underground during World War II. Shortly thereafter, in 1941, his father was rounded up by French authorities working for the Nazis. Two years later, his mother was seized while riding the Paris Metro. Both were returned to the country of their birth, to the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were killed.
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Meet Dayna Brown, new administrator of the Office on Aging. See story, page 16.
LEISURE & TRAVEL Jacques Fein, center, won Howard County’s Volunteer of the Year award for his decades of assistance to numerous local and national organizations. He has counseled youth who commit hate crimes, spoken to visitors at the Holocaust Memorial Museum (he’s a survivor), raised funds for the needy and more. Pictured with Fein are Howard County Council member Jen Terrasa and Council chair Dr. Calvin Ball.
They remained in the orphanage for two years, until Harry and Rose Fein. a childless couple from Newark, N.J., adopted them. Like many fellow immigrants from that time, Fein still recalls his first image of America from the deck of the ship that brought him and his sister to America after a 14-day ocean voyage. “It was a foggy, rainy day and suddenly everyone rushed to one side of the ship. Coming out of the fog,” he said, “was the Statue of Liberty.” Fein went to elementary and high school in Newark, then on to Clark University in Wooster, Mass. Soon after graduation he began a career in the nascent com-
puter industry in the 1960s. He later obtained an advanced degree at Johns Hopkins, and for nearly 40 years has worked in the aerospace industry. Today, he continues to work on the space program at Computer Sciences Corp. in Washington where, he said, he finds “the work is still challenging.”
Repaying a deep debt But it is Fein’s many volunteer activities that recently earned him special recognition from the county. Fein says his decades of public service See JACQUES FEIN, page 28
Visiting Confucius’ home town in China; plus, how to become an airport VIP on the cheap page 23
FITNESS & HEALTH 4 k “Super broccoli” to the rescue k An app for better vision THE SENIOR CONNECTION 16 k Howard County Office on Aging Newsletter LAW & MONEY 18 k Five retiree money mistakes k Fast food stocks on upswing ARTS & STYLE k Light in the woods
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