Sara Berkowitz

Extraordinary Requests for Remembrance

"What can I do as a descendant of perpetrators to ensure that the names of these victims are not forgotten?" Requests to fill out Pages of Testimony and thus commemorate Holocaust victims are the essence of Yad Vashem's Names Recovery Project, and are dealt with on a daily basis. It is usually a surviving family member who asks to memorialize the names of their beloved ones so brutally murdered by the Nazi Germans or their collaborators. At other times, the submitter is a member... Read more

The Other Michael Zaibel: Pages of Testimony Lead to Family Reunion

In June 2018, Yad Vashem's Names Recovery Project team received an unusual phone call. With a tremble in his voice, the caller requested that Yad Vashem remove the Pages of Testimony he had once filled out for his uncle and three cousins from the Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names."I always thought that their chance of survival was impossible – even more so than any of my other relatives whom we knew had been murdered. Yet, the unbelievable has happened. Now, after... Read more

One Ray of Sunshine

Nika Kohn Fleissig's remarkable Shoah survival story recently took another unexpected detour. At 97 years old, Fleissig's outstanding strength of character and determined personality allowed her to act on impulse and fly from Arizona, USA to Israel, in order to visit Yad Vashem. Her objective was to see for herself the olive tree that had been planted in honor of Sophia Pozniak, her Polish piano teacher, who was honored in 1979 by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations – the prestigious... Read more