Mark L. Wygoda

My father, Hermann Wygoda, was a German-born Polish Jew who became the commander of 2,500 Italian partisans in northwest Italy. In the Shadow of the Swastika, which he originally wrote in Polish in 1945 while living in a mountain cave in Italy, chronicles not only his role as a partisan division commander but also his previous covert work in Poland, Germany, and Estonia.

I am a professor emeritus from McNeese State University who now lives in North Carolina where I am a member of the Holocaust Speakers Bureau of the Center for Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights Education of NC. Although my academic background is in science, I also have more than 30 years of experience giving presentations about my father at Holocaust commemorations, schools, adult education classes, civic clubs, and libraries across the country.