On June 28, Survivor Halina Zimm shared her story of living through the Holocaust at a session of the Alexander Lebenstein Teacher Education Institute at the Virginia Holocaust Museum. About 40 teachers were at the session.
Following her story sharing, the teachers surrounded her with special greetings and posed for photographs.
Halina repeatedly stressed that love over hate is her message as she does during all her talks about the Holocaust before groups and individuals. Her father and mother perished during the Holocaust and many other family members. “Life was very good for my two sisters and my mother and father before the war, but quickly changed when the war broke out and Nazis invaded Poland,” she explained.
She described how her father arranged to get Christian identity documents for her two sisters and her, and the three lived separately in different places.
“I survived by pretending to be Wanda, a young Catholic girl.” She worked as a housekeeper in the home of a young Polish Christian woman and her husband. The home was very near the Warsaw Ghetto.
