FELICIA LIBAN, HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR TALKS WITH THE MIDSHIPMEN

The United States Naval Academy’s Commodore Uriah P. Levy Center and Jewish Chapel was honored to host 91- year-old Holocaust survivor, Ms. Felcia Liban, and her daughter Julie, to share her accounts with a large crowd of Midshipmen on Tuesday evening. Felicia is still as lucid, spirited and engaging as ever! 

This spring, she spoke at the Levy Center for the Yom Hashoah “Days of Remembrance” Memorial Service in the Miller Chapel. She returned at the invitation of the Jewish Midshipmen Club so that they could hear more of her inspirational tales of moral clarity, survival and a lifetime of dedicated leadership by sharing observations from this turning point in world history. 

Ms. Liban recounted her harrowing tale of survival as a youngster in Krakow, Poland following the German invasion of Poland in 1939. She shared her narrow escape from the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto, years of protection by the Polish underground and a family of righteous gentiles memorialized in Israel’s Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem. She described her emotional reunification with her mother and uncles following the war who were incarcerated and nearly perished in a Concentration Camp and her father’s loss during the war. She further explained her immigration and assimilation into American society. 

“You are witnessing history,” USNA Chaplain Yonina Creditor reminded the enthralled audience … “you will no doubt meet “deniers” in the future that will claim the Holocaust didn’t occur. … we all just heard a first-hand account of how it was very real and deadly for Felicia and her family and fellow Polish Jews.”

USNA Chaplains

Jewish War Veterans of the U.S.A.

Rabbi Yonina Creditor

U.S. Naval Academy Alumni Association & Foundation