Liz Igra has been telling her story for more than 40 years. Igra, who is 91 and lives at Eskaton Carmichael, spoke to about 50 fellow residents about how she and her mother fled the Holocaust in the early 1940s.
Her roughly hour-long talk appeared to resonate. “They seemed to want to hear more, so I guess I might have to fill in the gaps,” Igra said. She spoke with The Bee in interviews between International Holocaust Remembrance Day in January and Israel’s observance on April 14.
When Igra began telling her story
The first time Igra is known to have granted an interview about surviving the Holocaust, for a 1983 story in The Sacramento Bee, she was hesitant to talk.
“It’s uncomfortable and I don’t know why,” Igra said then. “There’s this fear that if I share my experiences with anyone, that pain will decrease and I’m not sure I want to lose that.” Igra has told her story repeatedly since that time. And the pain hasn’t been lost, which was evident during her March 24 talk at Eskaton when she discussed the death of her young cousin during the Holocaust. “I’m sorry,” Igra told the room. “This is a hard part for me.”
Igra encouraged other children of Holocaust survivors to speak up in a 2011 Bee story. “You are their voice, you are their stand-in,” Igra told them. When she spoke to The Bee for the 1983 and 2011 stories, she was at Shalom School, which she cofounded in 1978. She founded the Central Valley Holocaust Educators’ Network, or CVHEN in 2009. Igra donated 1,700 books to help the network open a Holocaust library at Mosaic Law Congregation near Sacramento State in 2016. “I want to mitigate the distortions and trivialization of this history – most of the time, it’s because people don’t know this history,” Igra told The Bee in 2021. “It compels me to do a better job teaching what we teach.”