Aliza Levy-Erber is a Rabbinic Pastor, Podiatric physician, College Professor, Hebrew teacher and Playwright whose play, Holocaust Syndrome, was performed in the tri-state area and rewritten into a one-woman play. Together with a colleague, she also facilitates a monthly Infant Survivor Holocaust Group. She was born in the Netherlands in 1943 at the height of the Nazi occupation and persecution.
Dr. Levy-Erber tells the story of how her father, active with the Dutch resistance, was caught and sent to a concentration camp in Holland; how her mother received permission to visit him and eventually married and gave birth to Aliza who, with their entire family, was deported and separated into pre-arranged hiding places; and how the underground took the infant Aliza to be hidden in a bunker dug deep in the Dutch woods, where she remained for two years.
Dr. Levy-Erber speaks of the surviving family members’ struggle to reunite and survive after the war, and of her own struggles growing up in isolation and starvation with a severely traumatized mother, and her need to find strength and resilience to create a meaningful life, understanding that the law-of-the-land decreed that she be put to death at the moment of her birth.
