A little while back, our volunteers got to visit Evgenia Gedzinskaya. The volunteers had the honor to hear her testimony from the Holocaust and get a glimpse of the hurdles that she went through. This is Evgenia’s story:

Evgenia Gedzinskaya is a former ghetto prisoner who was born on Christmas Eve, 1935, in Bershad, Ukraine. Evgenia’s father was disabled, hence why he wasn’t drafted into the Red Army and stayed with his family in Bershad once the war broke out. When Nazi Germany invaded, Bershadad turned into a ghetto. In the place where Evgenia’s family (she, her father, mother, and younger sister) lived, there was a basement where about 12 of their relatives lived, in addition to three more stranger refugees. All the residents of the house had to deal with extreme cold, hunger, despair, and illnesses such as typhus. At the time of the invasion, Evgenia’s mother was pregnant with a baby. Unfortunately, she gave birth to the baby in the ghetto, and due to the terrible conditions there, she could not produce milk. This resulted in the baby passing away just soon after he entered this world. Eventually, during the war, a bomb hit their house. This completely destroyed it, killed Evgenia’s father, and wounded her mother and sister. From then until the liberation of the Ghetto, Evgenia’s family was forced to wander the streets in hopes of finding a shelter. In 1994, Evgenia went back to school, and only through sheer perseverance and overcoming poverty and hunger did she manage to finish 10 classes and enter the Odessa Financial Institute. After graduating from the institute, she settled and began working in the Lipovetsky district center of the Vinnytsia region before immigrating to Israel in 1991 with her husband, daughter, and son. Just two years into their new life in Israel, Evgenia’s husband passed away. Now, Evgenia lives with her son in Kiryat Yam.