Resources on Local Survivors
Video Testimony
Generations Speaker Series
The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh is proud to present the Generations Speaker Series. This series, which is hosted in-person and recorded for online viewing, consists of dialogues between Holocaust survivors and their family members, as well as talks by members of our Generations Speakers Bureau. All talks are free and open to the public.
The Holocaust Testimony Project
In honor of our 30th anniversary, the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh created a 2 part documentary, The Holocaust Testimony Project. Both parts are available in their entirety on our YouTube channel, featuring testimony from 17 local survivors.
Local Testimony at USHMM
Collection of oral testimony that consists of 35 interviews of Holocaust survivors and liberators in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area.
The Living Legacy Project
In 2015 and 2016, staff members of the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh and photographer Ryan Michael White visited with Pittsburgh’s Holocaust Survivors and documented their stories.
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.