Louise Lawrence-Israels, a Holocaust survivor, will speak at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts on April 1.
Lawrence-Israels was born in the Netherlands in 1942, two years after German forces had invaded the country. Nazi’s confiscated her family’s business, and the family was ordered to move to Amsterdam in 1943, according to her biography on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. The family went into hiding to escape further deportation.
Lawrence-Israels’ father was able to rent the top floor of a storage building and acquired false identification paper for the family. Only her father would leave the apartment to get food and medicine for the family and news about the war.
She learned to walk in the apartment, and her mother taught Lawrence-Israels and her brother their letters, songs, colors and other information about the outside world. During air raid alarms, the family would seek refuge on the staircase of the row house, according to the website.
On May 5, 1945, Canadian forces liberated Amsterdam. Lawrence-Israels was 3 years old. Initially after the war she had difficulty adjusting to a world where she was not trapped inside. She had not been outside of the apartment since her birth.
Her father eventually found work in Stockholm, Sweden, and the family followed him there in the winter of 1946. The family moved back to the Netherlands in 1948. She earned a degree in physical therapy in the Netherlands. She married an American medical student in 1965 and moved to the United States in 1967. They eventually settled in Bethesda, Md., in 1994 after her husband retired from the military.
Lawrence-Israels now serves as a volunteer for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about Lawrence-Israels, visit asmsa.me/holocaustsurvivor.
The lecture will be at 2:30 p.m. April 1 in the Oaklawn Foundation Community Center in the Creativity and Innovation Complex. The event is free and open to the public.
Photo of Louise Lawrence-Israels courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum