Yosef Govrin was born in 1930 in Romania. He was deported to various ghettos and camps in Transnistria. Yosef was liberated by Soviet soldiers in December 1944.

• For information on Romania, click here
• For information on Transnistria, click here

Additional Resources

Research
• For an excerpt from "The Renewal of Life Among She'arit Hapleta - A Psychological View" by psychologist Hillel Klein, click here

Photographs after Liberation
•  Two survivors after liberation, Bergen-Belsen, Germany, April 1945
• Sarel Nechemya, about 14 years old, saying Kaddish immediately after Vilna had been liberated, Lithuania

Classroom Discussion Questions

• Why do you think Yosef Govrin does not feel that Victory Day is a day of celebration?
• Consider that many prisoners survived the Nazi camps by focusing only on their most immediate daily needs, and thinking about almost nothing else. How do you think this situation affected their experience of liberation?
• One of the most difficult things that liberated survivors had to deal with was intense loneliness. Prof. Hanna Yablonka, a Holocaust historian and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, describes her mother's sentiments upon graduating from nursing school, a few years after the Holocaust. According to Hanna, her mother was elated, and yet plagued with an overwhelming sense of loneliness - she truly had no one with whom to share her news. What do you think is the difference between the loneliness that we all sometimes experience and the loneliness that Holocaust survivors felt after liberation?