b'LUSIA (ROSENZWEIG) MILCHLusia (Rosenzweig) Milch was born on December 25, 1930, in Skalat, Poland, a small town located between Lvov and Tarnopole, in what is now Western Ukraine, within a significant and active Jewish community. Her father, David Rosenzweig, died at an early age and her mother, Necha (Rubin), remarried and had a second daughter when Lusia was seven. Starting in 1942, the Jewish community of Skalat was collected into a ghetto and then liquidated in 1943, some in the nearby Belzec killing camp but most by the Einsatzgruppen actions, which characterized the broad destruction of Jewish life in that part of Europe. Lusia managed to escape from the mass killings, which claimed her mother, half sister, stepfather, and over 100 other family members in June 1943, and was in hiding for 9 months, from bunker to bunker and peasant home to home, before liberation of the area by advancing Russian troops in February 1944.All of this is described in detail in the book, Death of a Shtetl. Lusia had an itinerant three and a half years after liberation, passing from country to country (Poland/Germany/Italy) and Displaced Persons (DP) camp to camp until finally coming to the U.S. to live with relatives in Far Rockaway, NYC in the fall of 1947 when she was 16, after crossing the Alps by foot in mid-winter of 1946. Israel is extremely important to me.I would set my own hand on fire for Israel and for its safety.Israel has given the Jewish people a protected and safe home.This survival story is portrayed in detail in the documentary on her life: A Survivors Journey: The Lusia Milch Story (https://vimeo.com/494510864/cf6088fbc3).Lusia and her husband Bernard, from the nearby Galician town of Kosova, met via family contacts briefly in Munich, Germany when they were living in separate DP camps - Foehrenwald (Lusia) and Lemberg (Bernard) - and were reintroduced once they both had emigrated to the U.S. Lusia went to Brooklyn College where she majored in Slavic Languages and Literature, which she taught at Hewlett High School for 10 years. Lusia and Bernard had two children: David, a physician and Neal, a lawyer. Lusia Milch has a virtually photographic memory of all the events that she and her fellow survivors experienced, including true horrors as seen through the eyes of a preternaturally aware child and, after liberation, teenager. She and her husband (January 2019, RIP) were, and Lusia remains at 92 years young, active philanthropists in the Jewish community, especially in helping establish the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, with Yad Vashem in Israel, and benefactors from a number of universities in the U.S. and Israel.'