Yom HaShoah Talk with Ettie Zilber

Join us for brunch and an enlightening and powerful conversation with Ettie Zilber, author of A Holocaust Memoir of Love and Resilience: Mama’s Survival from Lithuania to America. Dr Zilber will speak about the challenges and struggles survivors faced after liberation through the lens of her own family’s experience.

While the term ‘liberation’ conjures up celebration and champagne glasses, it was nothing like that for those who were barely alive in 1945. Prisoners awoke one morning to discover suddenly that their Nazi guards were gone; they watched with worry as their liberators appeared. After five years of terror and abuse, what did the next five years have in store for Ettie’s family and hundreds of thousands of other Jewish displaced persons? Without social media or telecommunications, how did they reunite with the ‘surviving remnants?’ How did they deal with their liberators, rehabilitate, and navigate the new dangers of war-torn and divided Europe… and then find a new home?

Dr. Zilber has had a long career as an educator and school director at international schools in six countries around the world. She was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany to Lithuanian parents who survived the Holocaust. Her retirement has given her the opportunity to fulfill a special mission: to research, document and publish her family’s Holocaust experiences and to share their stories. To date, Dr. Zilber has addressed 12,000 people of all ages in her talks. She also trains Holocaust educators, interviews survivors and serves as a docent at museum exhibits about the Holocaust. She is the translator from Yiddish to English of The Destruction of Jewish Kovno, by Joseph Gar.