Margie Oppenheimer

Margie Oppenheimer as nurse after WWII (AP Photo/Courtesy Margie Oppenheimer)

Margie Oppenheimer as a nurse after WWII (AP Photo/Courtesy Margie Oppenheimer)

Holocaust survivor and nurse Margie Oppenheimer was born on May 9, 1924, in Oelde, Germany.   On November 9, 1938, she and her family were attacked in a pogrom known as “Kristallnacht” (Night of the Broken Glass) and in December 1941 deported to the Jewish ghetto in Riga, Latvia. Over the next several years, Oppenheimer would spend time in 5 concentration camps: Sloka (Latvia), Riga-Kaiserwald (Lativia), Bruss-Sophienwalde (Poland), Stutthof (Danzig) and Goddentow (Germany).
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Linda Richards

Linda Richards (1841-1930)

Linda Richards (1841-1930)

Widely recognized as America’s first professionally trained nurse, Linda Richards was born on July 27, 1841 in West Potsdam, New York.   Caring for her dying mother, and then her fiancé, who was gravely wounded during the Civil War, sparked an interest in nursing, even though she had studied teaching for a year.
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Edith Shain

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt, taken on V-J Day, 1945 (from Life Magazine).

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt, taken on V-J Day, 1945 (from Life Magazine).

Edith Shain was born in Tarrytown, New York on July 29, 1918. She later attended the New York University nursing program and worked as a psychiatric nurse at Doctor’s Hospital in New York City. Upon learning that World War II had ended, on August 14, 1945, she went to Times Square with a friend to celebrate. Continue reading