Daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust Survivors from Lithunia

Recounts harrowing ordeal of parents and grandparents to survive Nazi occupation

Gila is the daughter and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Her Mother and grandparents were forced into the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania in 1941, where they lived in squalor, fear and starvation for three years. Her mother, as a toddler, was hidden during the KinderAktion, when the Nazis kidnapped every child they could find in the ghetto, and from then on lived in hiding under a plank in the ghetto room the family shared.

Gila has extensively researched her family experience and visited key historical sites including their residences in Lithuania. She has uncovered new details about the harrowing ordeal her family lived through and the sheer determination that propelled them to survive the brutal years under Nazi occupation. With the help of the partisans and the Jewish underground, they began a new life in Europe and later in Montreal, Canada. She has found video interviews, deposition and trial transcripts describing her family’s experience as it shed light on how they would be the only family to survive the Nazis’ liquidation of the Kovno Ghetto intact. Her grandfather, a prominent Zionist leader in Lithuania before the war, testified in Nazi war criminal trials, wrote a book on Lithuanian Jewry, and worked as the Montreal correspondent for the Algemeiner Journal.

Gila is a member of GenerationsForward, a group of second and third generation individuals sponsored by the Holocaust & Human Rights Education Center of White Plains, New York. She recently presented at the Hackley School. To download an editable flyer, CLICK HERE