ZYGMUNTOWICZ
Author, poet to speak April 21 in advance of Holocaust Remembrance Day
By Jewish Review
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Holocaust survivor, author and poet Itka Zygmuntowicz will speak at the West Hills Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship 7 p.m. April 21.
Zygmuntowicz’s appearance is co-sponsored in advance of Yom HaShoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day—by Kol Shalom Community for Humanistic Judaism and WHUUF.
Zygmuntowicz was incarcerated at Auschwitz through most of her teenage years.
After being relocated from their home of Ciechanow, 50 miles north of Warsaw, to Nowo Miasto ghetto, the family wasdeported to Auschwitz in 1942.
On their arrival at Auschwitz, her mother, father, brother and sister were deemed unfit for work. She never saw her family again.
In January 1945, as the war neared its conclusion, Zygmuntowicz and thousands of other prisoners were forced to walk in what became known as a death march to another camp further behind the receding German lines.
After she was liberated Zygmuntowicz came to the United States. She lives in Philadelphia and has family in Portland.
She speaks frequently about her Holocaust experience at universities, and primary and secondary schools in the Philadelphia and New York City areas.
She also has shared her Auschwitz experience on radio and television programs, including a documentary film.
Her stories have been published in “Four Generations of Jewish Women’s Spirituality” and in “Women in the Holocaust.”
She participated in the March of the Living to the concentration camps in Poland and has been interviewed and filmed by Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation.
Writing in “Women Imagine Change: A Global Anthology of Women’s Resistance from 600 B.C.E. to the Present,” Jean F. O’Barr, founding director of Women’s Studies at Duke University, said of Zygmuntowicz: she “carried the lessons learned from her mother and grandmother to Auschwitz and beyond. Her story gives us a glimpse of the enduring impact of lessons that interweave the personal and the political.”
Admission is free. WHUUF is at 8470 SW Oleson Road. Call 503-459-4210 or e-mail office@kolshalom.org for more details.