Holocaust Survivor Uses Her Story to Help Women in Domestic Violence Shelters

In April, as part of the Israeli project "Memory in the Living Room," 90-plus-year-old Holocaust survivor Hana Gofrit spoke to young women at a large, pleasant villa that serves as a temporary shelter for women who fled violent partners with their children, including infants. For the past five years, Gofrit has come there every Holocaust Remembrance Day to speak, encourage, and offer hope to residents of one of three shelters run by the "No to Violence Against Women" association and the Welfare Ministry.

Gofrit was born in a small town in Poland and was an only child. After World War II broke out in 1939, Jews were barred from school, and she says that standing outside her school gate and being denied entry was a defining moment. Her family moved from house to house, her father was taken and never returned, and she and her mother hid for two years on the sixth floor of a building in Warsaw, surviving on soup and a slice of bread a day. She says imagination helped her survive, and after the war she and her mother made aliyah after surviving the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

In Tel Aviv, her mother ran a clothing store, and Gofrit reinvented herself as a teenager, joined a youth movement, married an Israeli-born man, and gave birth to her son on the day Adolf Eichmann was hanged. She later became a public health nurse, headed nursing in Tel Aviv, and served in the professional union. Only at age 60, after a trip to Poland, did she begin reconnecting with her past, eventually becoming a sought-after speaker. She told the women, "I call myself a winner," because she survived, built a family, and learned to value life.

The shelter residents, speaking under pseudonyms, said Gofrit helped them feel less alone. One described telling her children they were going to a temporary home and hearing her son say he was glad they would no longer see his father drinking beer. Another said her four-year-old daughter panicked when they passed the old neighborhood. The women said the shelter felt like a tribe, a place where others understand without judgment.

After October 7, Gofrit also visited evacuated families at the Dan Accadia Hotel in Herzliya. There, a child from the Gaza border area asked if she was a Holocaust survivor and said she had hidden in a closet. Gofrit said the viral exchange of two survivors, 80 years apart, led her to emphasize strength rather than victimhood. She and the women discussed whether to forgive abusers. Gofrit said she does not live in anger, because "I want to build and be built," and urged the women to see themselves as worthy, take the first step, and keep climbing.