Not Just A Survivor: A Portrait Of My Mother
featured:
Rochy Miller, daughter of Holocaust Survivor Lea Leibowitz and third generation survivor, Kerryn Lehman
August 18, 2023
“The camp is getting fuller and fuller. I talk to the Sanitater – an SS guard, who collects the sick from all the other camps and brings them here – and he tells me that when there are over a thousand inmates, they are sent away. And I see that the camp is filling up and filling up and filling up. So I decided – I am not going away with them to Auschwitz. I have to get out of here!”
My mother, Lea Lebowitz, was a Holocaust survivor. She embodied the Holocaust. She experienced it physically, lived it emotionally and studied it intellectually. She spent her entire life trying to make logical sense of an inexplicable trauma that ruled her life and decimated her past. But being a Survivor was never all of who she was. She was so much more – somebody truly special who survived and enriched people’s lives not because of the Holocaust, but despite it.
Filled with the many stories of love, loss, hope, friendship, and food, told and retold – some by her, and some about her – this book creates a composite of the warm, intelligent, and amazing person that she was. These are her stories. This memoir provides an insight into the life of a truly exceptional woman. A Holocaust survivor’s tale told across two families and three continents before, during and after World War II. A remarkable meditation on suffering, resilience, and rebirth.