We also had the honour of meeting Ilana Ivanova, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor from Liepāja. She was born in 1946, shortly after the Second World War. She shared that the topic was still very emotional for her, but she went on to tell us about her father who survived because he was a "very talented man who created and repaired things", also for the Nazis.
She explained that her family, especially her father, always tried to shield her from his past and did not want to talk about it with her, even after she found pictures and explicitely asked him.
So, even though she was never directly confronted with her families past as a child or had to experience the horrors of the Nazi crimes first hand, she still remembers constantly being afraid without understanding why, especially when she became a mother herself.
It was a very emotional and deeply moving lecture, and everyone in the room could still see and feel her pain. She described life before the Nazi era, when everyone treated each other with respect and your religion did not matter in everyday life.
She appealed to us to cherish peace as our most important treasure and reminded us that we must always do our best to preserve it, as it is also a very fragile treasure. I found our conversation with her truly powerful and inspiring, and am very grateful for this chance.
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