November 5, 2007
Lyon College News Bureau

A woman whose parents died in a World War II Nazi prison camp will visit Lyon College on Monday, Nov. 19, to share her story of the impact the Holocaust had on her life. The program, at 6:30 p.m. in Nucor Auditorium, is free and open to the public.

Born in Romania of well-to-do parents, Nina Krupitsky had to flee her homeland on foot from Chernowitz, in what was then Romania, on her parents’ orders. Her parents were eventually captured by Nazis and Romanian fascists and put in a ghetto camp in Western Ukraine, where they later died.

Though Krupitsky was never in a ghetto or prison camp, she describes the people she met along the way who assisted her and hid her during her flight.

She’s married to Emmanuel Krupitsky, 84, who led his siblings out of the Minsk ghetto in 1941 and had to leave his mother behind to die. The Krupitskys came to the U.S. in 1980.

In 1997, Nina founded the Knowing Our Past foundation a group that promotes Holocaust education in Arkansas, a state with one of the lowest percentages of Jews. The foundation was recently incorporated into the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education at the University of Southern California.

Shoah is a non-profit organization established by filmmaker Steven Spielberg in 1994, after he made the Academy Award-winning film “Schindler’s List.” The foundation records the testimonies of Holocaust survivors as a collection of videotaped interviews. “Shoah” is Hebrew for holocaust.

Krupitsky has recently finished writing her autobiography, with the help of Lyon College visiting writer Phillip McMath of Little Rock, and is currently looking for a publisher.

For more information, contact Barbara Dyer, director of Residence Life at Lyon College at (870) 698-4310.