In 1965 Rita Benn’s parents honoured the memory of her father’s parents, Leiba and Rosa Benjaminovitsch by supporting a scholarship at the Hebrew University.  This is her story. 


Yom Ha’shoah, a National Day of Remembrance to honor the victims of the Shoah – those who were murdered during the war and those who had lived through the horrendous experience of imprisonment in ghettos and concentration camps or hidden in farms or by families. In 1941, my parents and 32 family members were detained in Kaunas (Kovno) Ghetto in Lithuania along with 29,000 other Jews in their community. By the end of the war, just three thousand survived, five from my family: my mother and father Alice and Philippe Benn; my mother’s sister, Sara Ginaite and husband, Misha; and a younger cousin, Tanya Virovitch, whom my mother saved from the notorious ‘Kinder Action’ that killed all the remaining Jewish children in the ghetto.

Rita’s mother, Alice, age 22 – Vilna, c. 1940

Every survivor has stories of incredible luck regarding their escape from death. My parents were no exception. It has been amazing for me to learn of the miracles that surrounded their survival, and equally, the horrors they endured and the extraordinary acts of courage, devotion, and heroism they showed at that time and in rebuilding their lives after the war.

How do we as the second-generation of survivor parents honour the legacy of what our families went through in their lives? As the survivors have dwindled, what is our responsibility to tell their stories?  How do we as a second generation acknowledge the ripple effects on us of the trauma they endured and the gifts that came from this history?

My parents were just 22 years of age, in 1940 when they both visited home for summer vacation from the colleges they attended in Brussels. They never thought they would not return that fall; that they would get stuck behind the Lithuanian borders as result of communist nationalism and then later, Nazi occupation. My parents and grandparents could not imagine what was yet to come. How could they? How could anyone?

After four years of suffering the trials of ghetto life, my parents were deported to concentration camps.  My mother, together with her mother Rebekka and other relatives, were sent to Stutthof, my father to Dachau. This was the last concentration camp transport out of Kovno, just three weeks shy of the Russians’ arrival to liberate this town from the Nazis.

Maternal grandmother, Rebekka – Vilna, c. 1938

The story as told to me was when the deportation order was announced, my parents and their families were hiding in a bunker. Rebekka, my maternal grandmother, was feeling claustrophobic and so ran out to get some air. My mother, fearful that she might faint or fall, followed after to try to bring her back and my father consequently chased after both of them. Almost immediately, all three were captured in the street. By not revealing where they came from, they hoped they had saved the other family members.

After this transport, the Germans set fire to the ghetto. They killed the 2,000 or so remaining Jews who remained in hiding, including my father’s parents, Leiba, and Rosa Sonimsky Benijaminovitch, his 20-year-old sister, my namesake Rita, and several other relatives. 

Rita’s father, Phillipe and his sister, Rita – Vilna, c. 1938

My father never found out exactly what happened to his family. One version is that they were burned to death. The Nazis razed the ghetto to the ground to prevent any evidence of eyewitnesses. Another version is that their hiding place had been discovered and they were marched to the fields and shot to death.  

Growing up my father never shared with me any stories of his family or his own experience during the war. All I knew of his family was that they were very well-to-do and Zionistic in orientation.  Likely the pain of his family’s unknown fate, his survivor guilt and his own mental anguish of suffering was too great to dredge up. Perhaps by keeping his experience under cover, he felt he could keep his pain under cover, and protect his children from knowing the extent of cruelty that humans are capable of.

My father died when he was 51 from cancer. His loss was devasting for my mother. Like the resilience she exhibited during the war and subsequently as an immigrant to Canada, she nonetheless preserved to make the best of her life until the end. My mother lived to the ripe age of 88, longer than her own mother who died two weeks before liberation from Stutthof at age 47, and her grandmother Malka, who at 75 had a heart attack immediately after learning that her three sons in their early twenties had been shot to death by an anti-Semitic Lithuanian gang.

Alice Benn dressed for a charity ball, Montreal, Quebec, 1963

My mother shared some of her own wartime experiences and what she knew of my father’s family and his experiences at Dachau when I was in college taking a Jewish history class. It was not until Stephen Spielberg’s Shoah project that I learned so much more. She proudly offered her testimony believing in its vital importance to make sure that we and generations to come, “never forget”.

After my mother died, I became part of a group at our synagogue called ‘Generations After’. We came together as adult children of Holocaust survivors to create annual services of remembrance for our congregation on Yom Ha’Shoah and Yom Kippur. We wanted to bring to light to our congregation both the tragic experiences of our parents’ Holocaust experiences and also the strength and resilience that they showed in starting life over after the war. Because we saw the profound impact that our stories had on our congregation year after year, I proposed that we write a book and share these experiences more broadly.

In April 2022, we published, The Ones Who Remember, Second-Generation Voices of the Holocaust. In this book, sixteen contributing authors reflect on the impact of their lived experiences growing up amidst the backdrop of the Holocaust. It is a deeply intimate and moving account that readers have found incredibly powerful and meaningful. In writing this book, we hope to preserve the history of the holocaust and its effects for future generations, to inspire others to act against injustice and to show that despite severe trauma or challenges encountered in life, there are many gifts that come along the way.

The Ones Who Remember, Second-Generation Voices of the Holocaust is available for purchase at local bookstores and online retailers. To learn more or to invite any of the authors to speak, you can visit their website: www.secondgenerationvoices.com


Rita, with husband, Steve, their adult children, and granddaughter Alice (age 8 months) – Ann Arbor, April, 2016. Since this family photo was taken, Rita has 3 more grandchildren, four in all – a testament that the legacy of her parents’ lineage continues.

We are grateful to Rita Benn for sharing this story to commemorate Yom Ha’shoah. In 1965 Rita’s parents honoured the memory of her father’s parents, Leiba and Rosa Benjaminovitsch by supporting a scholarship at the Hebrew University. 

The Hebrew University is home to the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism (SICSA). Established in 1982 as an interdisciplinary research center dedicated to an independent, non-political and critical approach to understanding the phenomenon of antisemitism.