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Resources on Local Survivors

Video Testimony


Published Works

By and about local Survivors and the Generations community

Flares of Memory: Stories of Childhood During the Holocaust

In a series of writing workshops at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, survivors who were children or teens during World War II assembled to remember the pivotal moments in which their lives were irreparably changed by the Nazis. These “flares of memory” preserve the voices of over forty Jews from throughout Europe who experienced a history that cannot be forgotten. Ninety-two brief vignettes arranged both chronologically and thematically recreate the disbelief and chaos that ensued as families were separated, political rights were abolished, and synagogues and Jewish businesses were destroyed. Survivors remember the daily humiliation, the quiet heroes among their friends, and the painful abandonment by neighbors as Jews were restricted to ghettos, forced to don yellow stars, and loaded like cattle into trains. Vivid memories of hunger, disease, and a daily existence dependent on cruel luck provide penetrating testimonies to the ruthlessness of the Nazi killing machine, yet they also bear witness to the resilience and fortitude of individual souls bombarded by evil.

Poetry by Local Survivor Solange Lebovitz

Solange Lebovitz was born in Paris, France, the youngest of six children. Her parents, Rosa and Eizik Dratler, born in Sighet, Transylvania, immigrated to Paris with their four children in the mid-twenties.During World War II, Solange was separated from her family and lived with an older Catholic couple in Couterne, Normandy. She was reunited with her family at the end of December 1944.She came to the United States in 1952 after marrying Larry Lebovitz, a Holocaust survivor from Czechoslovakia. At the age of 42, while raising their two children, Michele and Marvin, she decided to resume her education and graduated cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh with a double major in English and French literature.