Winston Commemorates Holocaust Remembrance Day with Survivor Lucy Lipiner

In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Winston & Strawn’s Diversity & Inclusion Committee hosted a conversation with Lucy Lipiner, author of Long Journey Home: A Young Girl’s Memoir of Surviving the Holocaust. New York Partner Beth Kramer moderated the inspiring conversation with Lucy.  

Lucy shared her family’s harrowing 10-year ordeal to evade the Nazis. She and her family departed from Poland on foot and in the middle of the night on September 1, 1939 when she was only six years old. After an arduous two-month journey, her family arrived in Russia, only to later be loaded into box cars and sent to a labor camp Siberia, where the adults were forced to work in the forest cutting trees and the family was hungry most of the time. When the war ended, the family made its way back to Poland only to learn of the horrors of the Holocaust and that the family they had left behind had all perished.

Lucy said her father and mother were completely defeated at this point. For so many, the fact that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust can seem somewhat abstract, but Lucy’s parents were real people, remembering and grieving the loss of real people.

After living in a displaced persons camp in Germany and an orphanage in Belgium, Lucy and her sister reunited with their parents and were able to immigrate to the United States. While on a train that was taking them to the ship that would carry them to their new life in Brooklyn, Lucy met a young man—on his way to the same ship to America—who would later become her husband.

When asked about her amazing resilience, she said, “We all have much more strength and perseverance than we give ourselves credit for.” She added, “Be strong and if you can, do good and it will come back to you.”

To learn more about Winston & Strawn’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee, click here.