"Big Sonia" Screening & Panel Discussion

Sonia Warshawski is one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors living in the Kansas City area, and one of the only survivors who speaks publicly about her wartime experience. Sonia’s enormous personality and fragile 4-foot-8-inch frame mask the horrors she endured.

On Monday, April 9, Park University will host a program that will include a screening of Warshawski’s story, “Big Sonia,” a live music performance and a panel discussion starting at 6 p.m. in the Jenkin and Barbara David Theater inside Alumni Hall on the University’s Parkville Campus. Admission to the event, a part of Park’s 2017-18 Year of Diversity series of events, is free and open to the public.

The event will begin with a short performance by the Park University International Center for Music’s Ben Sayevich, professor of music/violin, and his wife, Lolita Lisovskaya-Sayevich, director of collaborative piano. The duo will perform “Nigun” from the suite “Baal-Shem: Three Pictures of Chassidic Life” composed by Ernest Bloch and “Schindler’s List for Violin and Piano” composed by John Williams. The film screening will begin at approximately 6:15 p.m. and will be followed by a panel discussion at approximately 7:45 p.m. Panelists will include: Rabbi Doug Alpert from Congregation Kol Ami in Kansas City, Mo.; Brian Cowley, Ph.D., Park University professor of psychology who has expertise in the Holocaust; and Jennifer Tavernaro, an educational adviser on the film who has been teaching Holocaust education and Warshawski’s story for the past 10 years in her classroom at Lakewood Middle School in the Blue Valley (Kan.) School District. Tavernaro’s students are highlighted in the film.