Ashes to Light

Born into a Jewish family in Lvov, Poland in the early-1930s, Nelly Ben-Or was to experience, at a very young age, the trauma of the Holocaust. This narrative of her life’s journey describes the miraculous survival of Nelly, her mother and her older sister. With help from family and friends, Nelly and her mother were smuggled out of the Ghetto in Lvov and escaped to Warsaw with false identity papers where they were under constant threat of discovery as Jews were sent to concentration camps and murdered. They then survived being taken on a train to Auschwitz, not, in fact, because they were Jews, but as citizens of Warsaw following the Warsaw Uprising against the Nazis. No less miraculous was how her innate musical talent survived and was even occasionally able to reveal itself, during these Holocaust years. After the war, they were reunited with Nelly’s sister, who had remained in hiding in Lvov.