The upcoming Friends of SaddleBrooke Libraries (FSL) lecture will feature Laura Markowitz, Project Producer for the Arizona Public Media (AZPM) series, “Children of the Holocaust”, at 4 p.m. in the DesertView Theatre on Thursday, March 21. The lecture is free for members to attend.
From 1941 to 1945, Germany’s Nazi regime murdered two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. Of the six million Jews who were victims of this genocide known as the Holocaust, an estimated 1.5 million were children. Against all odds, some children managed to survive.
Markowitz interviewed 20 child survivors of the Holocaust who now live in Southern Arizona. Some experienced the horrors of concentration camps. Some survived by hiding in attics, barns and holes in the ground, or were able to pass as Gentiles. Others fled with their families and became refugees with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Their first-hand accounts describe the brutality they witnessed and the acts of kindness that saved them.
This multi-platform, living-history project documents one of the darkest periods in human history—before this generation is gone and their stories are lost to us forever.
Laura Markowitz has been a Contributing Producer for Arizona Public Media since 2009, covering education, the environment, social justice, and more for NPR 89.1 and PBS-6. Trained in family therapy so she could better cover the mental health fields, she served as Senior Editor for the magazine, Psychotherapy Networker, winning a National Magazine Award for writing. She was Editor-in-Chief of In the Family, an award-winning magazine covering LGBTQ family and mental health issues, and she was a regular contributor to Glamour, Ms., Utne Reader and many other publications. She is the co-editor of two books, “The Art of Psychotherapy” and “The Evolving Therapist”.
After relocating to Arizona in 2002, she shifted from magazine feature writing to book writing and editing and multimedia production. In 2012, she published a critically acclaimed young adult novel called, “Book of the Sky God”. More recently, she coauthored, “Voices on The Economy: How Open-Minded Exploration of Rival Perspectives Can Spark Solutions to our Urgent Economic Problems”, (2022) and a forthcoming book about racism called, “Facing the White Shadow”. She is currently serving as the Pima County Library Writer-in-Residence.
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