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Dr. Gila Fatran (née Goldstein), her brother Avraham, his wife and their younger son survived the Holocaust in hiding. All her other family members perished in the Holocaust. Born in 1929 in Michalovce, Slovakia, Gila Fatran and her family fled to Budapest in 1943 but following the German occupation of Hungary in 1944, they returned to Žilina, Slovakia. In 1949 Gila immigrated to Israel. She studied at the Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem Universities, worked as a teacher for over 30 years and has published extensively on Holocaust history and the history of Slovak Jewry. Gila Fatran is a member of the Commission for the Designation of the Righteous Among the Nations.
Slovakia’s Righteous Among the Nations
Slovak-Jewish relations, an important factor in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, were influenced in no small part by events that took place in the latter third of the 19th century. That century saw the national awakening of oppressed nations. The Slovak nation, ruled by the Hungarians for 1,000 years, was struggling at the time for its national existence. The creation of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy led in 1867 to the granting of equal civil rights to the Jews in the empire in the... Continue reading
Livia Rothkirchen — In Memoriam
Several days before Passover 2013, the historian, Yad Vashem staff member, and former editor of Yad Vashem Studies, Dr. Livia Rothkirchen, passed away. Livia was a pioneering and important researcher in diverse fields, above all, the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia in its various respects; her reputation preceded her in this domain in Israel and the world over. Livia had been ill in recent years and found it difficult to connect with her admirers; consequently, she kept to herself. This was a harsh... Continue reading