Judith Meisel

Judith Meisel (F / Lithuania, 1929), Holocaust survivor.

• <Stutthof>

USHMM Oral Interview

Judith Meisel, born in 1929, discusses her father’s death in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1938 when the family lived in Josvainiai; her experience as a prisoner in Stutthof; life after escaping Stutthof with her sister, who had typhus at the time; living in a convent; working for a family as a refugee; nearly drowning in the North Sea after her ship was torpedoed; living in the woods in Denmark; being liberated by the Red Cross; contracting tuberculosis and staying in a sanitarium in Copenhagen, Denmark; finding her brother; meeting her ex-husband and moving to Canada; getting married; how the Holocaust shaped her life; Zionism and Israel; starting a family; the Civil Rights movement in the United States; meeting Martin Luther King; how she began sharing the memories of her experiences during the Holocaust; going back to the Kaunas ghetto; creating the Beyond Tolerance Center; working on the Anne Frank exhibit in Santa Barbara, CA; her daughter’s Holocaust art; founding the Northwest Interfaith Movement; going to Israel; being a single mother; meeting her second husband; the feminist movement; her film of her trip back to Lithuania; and her philanthropic achievements.