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The official website of Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love & Partisan Resistance published by St. Martin's Press and maintained by author Michael Bart.
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UNTIL OUR LAST BREATH
A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance

Newspaper Reviews

Nominated by the American Library Association for a Sophie Brody Medal
a national award for the most distinguished contribution to Jewish literature published in the United States

Winner of the 60th Annual Christopher Award!

YIVO News
  • San Diego Union Tribune--Commemorating Stories of Darkness with Light
    By: MATTHEW T. HALL
    Printed on the front page in Section A: Monday, April 16, 2012


  • Click here for articleSan Diego Union Tribune
    SAN DIEGO, CA--Commemorating Stories of Darkness with Light. Yom Hashoah is the day each year when Jews worldwide commemorate the Holocaust. They pray and light candels for those who cannot. They remember and honor and teach. They cry.

    Hundreds observed this ceremony sunday at a gathering in La Jolla.

    Featured both in the newspaper and online. For the full article go to: San Diego Union Tribune


    Click here for articleSan Diego Union Tribune Click here for articleSan Diego Union Tribune

    Imagine growing up without grandparents.

    Michael Bart did.

    He's 59 now and lives in Carlsbad. His parents live through him.

    In 2008, St. Martin's Press published "Until Our Last Breath," a book Bart wrote about his parents. It won a Christopher Award--a prize bestowed over decades upon projects such as Steven Speilberg's "Schindler's List."

    The back of the award bears a flame and the inscription, "Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness."

    The story goes that Leizer Bart and Zenia Lewinson were married by one of the last remaining rabbis in a ghetto in what is modern-day Lithuania. The Barts fled into the Rudnicki Forest with 120 underground members, half of them crawling through sewers for four to six hours to escape.

    In the ghetto they clutched rationed bread. In the forest, they clutched rifles, and Leizer Bart developed a specialty: blowing up German supply trains.

    Afterwards, when they moved to America, neither talked about the war much.

    Leizer Bart moved his family from Springfield, Mass., to San Diego in 1966, and he and his wife joined the New Life Club, a group of local survivors. There, they ran into Mike Zaks, a man Leizer Bart hadn't seen since he was 23 and Zaks was 13, in Poland, before the war.

    They became fast friends in their new life.

    Then in 2005, after both of Michael Bart's parents had died, Zaks invited him to a planning meeting for the 2006 Yom Hashoah event.

    Zaks knew Bart's mother as the first person to volunteer for anything. He knew Bart's father as an organized person with an affinity for getting along with everyone. He saw both traits in their son and grabbed his arm.

    "Michael, we need your help," he said.

    The event had attracted about 200 people a year, mostly survivors and their families memebers. It was dying like the survivors themselves.

    Zaks implored Bart, a real estate investor, to turn it into something that would appeal to the broader community and endure.

    Bart agreed to try, and now the ceremony draws 700 people.

    "When Mike asked me to do something, it almost felt like my father was asking me," Bart said.

    Imagine a connection that strong.


  • Springfield Republican--Kids in Print 2010: NIE essay and art contest results
    Printed in Section S: Tuesday, March 09, 2010

  • Click here for articleSpringfield Republican
    SPRINGFIELD, MASS--Kids in Print section today. Winners wrote, illustrated on theme of standing up to bullies. Don't miss the pullout section in The Republican's annual writing and art contest for students in grades 1 through 12. This year's theme was anti-bullying and winners in the high school category wrote about the courage of Major League Baseball's Jackie Robinson, jailed oppostion leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma and the late World War II partisan and Holocaust survivor Zenia Lewinson-Bart whose family lived in Springfield.

    Kids in Print winners will be honored at a reception March 24 at the Michele and Donald D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts.


  • Springfield Republican--Kids in Print 2010: Printed in Section S: Tuesday, March 09, 2010

  • Click here for contest resultsSpringfield Republican
    SPRINGFIELD, MASS--The Republican held their annual Kids in Print Writing Contest. This program, one of the longest-running and most popular of its kind in Western Massachusetts, gives students in grades 9-12 the opportunity to hone their creative writing skills while competing to have their work published in the largest newspaper in Western Massachusetts.

    2009-2010 Writing Contest Topics: Students selected from one of the following people and described what they risked by standing up against oppression and hatred. In a well-organized 750-900 word essay, the students gave at least 3 reasons as to why they chose to write about the person they selected.

    1. By becoming the first African-American to play for a Major League Baseball team, Jackie Robinson became both a symbol of courage and the object of hatred.
    2. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest in Myanmar (Burma) for 14 of the last 20 years because of her pro-democracy stance in opposition to the current military regime.
    3. Former Springfield resident Zenia Lewinson-Bart stood up against the Nazis' campaign to murder people of the Jewish faith and terrorize anyone that stood in their way.*
    *Zenia's story can be read online by visiting www.hatikvah-center.org and clicking on "In Their Own Words," or by reading the book, "Until Our Last Breath," written by her son Michael Bart and available at the Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center in Springfield.

    Writing Contest Guidelines: Writing entries were judged by a professional panel of writers, critics, and educators based on topic development (35%), effective and rich use of language (25%), logical organization (20%), and proper spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, and grammar (20%). Only essays which adhered to the stated subject matter were considered.

  • Springfield Republican--A son's journey into parents' heroic past.
    By ANNE-GERARD FLYNN
    Printed: Sunday, October 18, 2009

  • Click hereNorth County Times Review
    By ANNE-GERARD FLYNN
    "SPRINGFIELD, MASS--Former Springfield resident Michael Bart, 56, was unaware that his parents had been part of a band of Jewish partisans who helped to liberate what is now the Lithuanian city of Vilnius from the Nazis during World War II. His journey into his parents' heroic past did not begin until his father's death in 1996 at the age of 81.

    "At my dad's funeral, one of the mourners came up to me and said I needed to inscribe 'Freedom Fighters of Nekamah' on my parents headstone to honor their involvement in the Jewish resistance movement in Vilna," said Bart, using the city's name when it was his mother's birthplace in 1922 and part of Poland.

    Bart shares his parents' story in the new panels added to the exhibit, "A Living Memorial," at the Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center in Springfield as well as in his book, "Until Our Last Breath," which won the prestigious Christopher Award when it was published in 2008.

    Both his parents escaped death a number of times before finding their way to a new life first in Springfield, where Michael and his brother, Bruce, were born, and later in San Diego.

    His mother, Zenia Lewinson-Bart, was 19 when the Nazis invaded Vilna. They forced her successful middle class family into one of two ghettos where they lived for nearly two years in one apartment with 100 other people. It was in the ghetto that she met and married 28-year-old Leizer Bart.

    At one point, Zenia was rounded up and taken to a prison that served as collection center for Jews to be shot. She begged a German soldier to spare her as someone who could work. The soldier responded with a blow to her head. She awoke to find those around her had been shot dead.

    Click hereNorth County Times Review
    By ANNE-GERARD FLYNN

    Shortly before the last deportation from the ghetto to extermination camps, Zenia and Leizer managed to escape with members of the underground to Rudnicki forest about 25 miles from the city, where they joined the legendary resistance fighter Abba Kovner and his "Avenger" partisan battalion. Leizer, who was seriously wounded on a mission to obtain food, helped mine and destroy enemy train and rail lines. Zenia cooked and carried supplies to other partisan camps.

    At war's end, the couple tried to return to Leizer's home town in Poland but a local priest warned that it was not safe for them. Zenia's hopes of being reunited with her mother and brother, who had been seen alive at a labor camp, cruelly ended when she arrived at the camp in Vilna to find the Nazis had shot all the prisoners, including her family members whose bodies she found in the court yard.

    It was then that Zenia, who spoke several languages, sent a postcard to "America, Springfield," telling an uncle that she was the last one in her immediate family to survive.

  • Families add to Holocaust exhibit 'A Living Memorial'

  • The new stories and photographs recently added to the permanent panels at the Hatikvah Holocuast Education Center in Springfield broaden the vignettes of the Jewish people with ties to this area who were exterminated by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II.

    However, the fact that the panels are part of the "A Living Memorial: Holocaust Survivor Families" exhibit, in which the stories are told in honest and intimate detail by the survivors or their descendants, allows something remarkable to happen.

    The viewer easily forms a connection both with those who were murdered and those who lived. The survivors by finding the courageto go on despite the horror inflicted on themselves and their families, managed to trump the brutality of bigotry and hatred. Please see Page G2 for the full article.

    For the more information about the opening of an expanded exhibit at the Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center in Springfield, Mass on Wednesday (Oct 21st 2009) see article by Anne-Gerard Flynn: Survivors, families add to exhibit.

  • North County Times--Holocaust tale 'Until Our Last Breath' captivates By JOEL D. AMOS
    Printed: Sunday, May 18, 2008

  • Click hereNorth County Times Review
    By JOEL D. AMOS
    "SAN DIEGO--Often authors of Holocaust stories are told there are too many books out there on the subject. Many persevere and produce triumphs that prove that there is no such thing as too much information when it comes to the telling of a systematic attempt at genocide.

    Authors Michael Bart and Laurel Corona (a professor at San Diego City College) have crafted a different kind of tribute to the survivors of the Holocaust. In telling the story of Bart's father, Leizer, their prose eloquently tells the story of Holocaust survivors from the perspective of their children.

    Leizer Bart was a member of the Jewish rebellion in Lithuania toward the close of World War II. The tale of his father's participation in this historic resistance movement came as news to Michael Bart at his father's funeral.

    Through depth of research, "Until Our Last Breath" makes a human connection to those few who chose to fight back and the love affair that was born through the unfolding tragedy. It was on the streets of Vilna (now Vilnius) that Bart's mother and father met and fell in love.

    Those of the Jewish faith, or any faith, can treasure Bart and Corona's work. It is extraordinary how deep into the mind-set of Europe's ghetto Jews their history penetrates. Therefore, "Until Our Last Breath" is not a Jewish story, it is a human story. The characters could be of any race or creed on any stretch of geography, and the sentiment would be the same. Coupled with the inherent desire of every human being to lead a life of freedom, love produces some of history's most compelling stories.

    The author's parents were married just before the Nazis overran the Lithuanian ghetto, which was home to the freedom fighters. Unable to escape, they took to the surrounding forests and joined a resistance movement that challenged the mighty Nazi blitzkrieg.

    "Until Our Last Breath" is as much an homage from a son to his parents as it is a gripping tale of history. The wonderment Bart injects into the story at his parents' passion and perseverance is awe-inspiring.

    Capturing dramatic elements of storytelling both as love and rebellion, "Until Our Last Breath" manages to intertwine the two arcs in one compelling tale. It is a powerful story that interjects the treasured moments of life amid unspeakable horror. It illustrates how the stolen kisses and silent giggles with a soulmate are what truly lie at the heart of why any enslaved people fight back to their last breath.

    "Until Our Last Breath" cannot be considered a perfect Mother's or Father's Day gift. Bart and Corona's story would be a fitting gift if there existed a Parents Day. The combined wisdom and strength of Bart's parents has produced as much a memoir of a child's love for those important figures as it is a tribute to a people who refused to go quietly into the night."

    "Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance"


  • Western MA Jewish Ledger--Springfield native tells love story of his partisan parents
    By LAUREN KRAMER
    Printed: Friday, August 15, 2008



  • "WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS--There's no denying it, "Until Our Last Breath" is a painful, exhausting book to read. Describing a love story between his parents that developed in the confines of the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania, author Michael Bart takes readers on an extensive journey through the experience of Vilna's Jewish community.

    His descriptions of life before and during the ghetto are so vivid that they draw the reader reluctantly into the story -- reluctantly because you cannot help but know the outcome for most of the Jews. With the foreknowledge that their fate is sealed, reading of their desperate fight to believe in the future is upsetting and disturbing. But if you foster any interest in the Holocaust and the psyche of those who perished during that time, this book will enlighten you considerably.

    Bart's own personal journey of discovery began in an unlikely place: at his father's funeral. As the last shovels of dirt were being added to the grave of Leizer Bart, a mourner approached his son with a cryptic reference to the Freedom Fighters of Nekamah, a group that Bart had never even heard of.

    This reference was the impetus for a decade--long research process during which Bart interviewed other survivors and delved into archives, learning about his parents' unlikely romance under the grimmest conditions imaginable. He also learned of their heroic service as members of the Jewish resistance. First within the walls of the ghetto, and later, when it became obvious there was nothing left to do in the ghetto, in bunkers in the Rudnicki Forest, nearby.

    The partisans' rebellion involved blowing up railway tracks to disrupt the flow of Nazi army services to the front lines, obtaining food from nearby villages. A risky enterprise during which Leizer was once sabotaged and shot, and helping to care for and organize other members of the resistance under the leadership of Abba Kovner. When Vilna was finally liberated, Leizer and his wife Zenia returned to their former hometowns to find that their families had been murdered by the Nazis. Their fight was over, and the only family either had remaining in Europe was each other. Zenia sunk into a deep depression, recovering only slightly when a doctor informed her that by continuing on this path, she would be helping Hitler accomplish his goal of destroying the Jews. A family member in Springfield helped the couple make their way to the United States, where they gradually began a new life and had children of their own.

    It must have come as a big surprise to Bart, who knew his mother as a homemaker and his father as an American immigrant who supported the family in a regular job and built a safe home for the family. He had heard a little about his father's partisan experience over the years, but to understand the full picture of his parents' lives in makeshift bunkers in a forest eating swamp soup to survive, would be quite a history to swallow.

    Bart was born in Springfield, relocating to the West Coast in 1966 because Leizer's health required a warmer climate. "My parents didn't talk much about their wartime experiences until 1994, when they started sharing more details with me," he says. "It was interesting, but I didn't have a way to connect the dots. Then, at my dad's funeral in November 1996, my life changed."

    In the course of his research, Bart bought every English book on Vilna, the ghetto and the partisans that he could find. He went through his parents' papers, called names in their old telephone books and started networking with survivors all over the world. "Organizations started helping me and this project just developed a life of its own," he says.

    He also visited Lithuania twice, journeys he found personally difficult given his research. "Most of the 70,000 Lithuanian Jews killed in the Holocaust were killed by Lithuanians who were collaborating with and under the supervision of the Nazis," he says. "They were pleasant enough to me but I carried that weight with me, of the intimacy of their involvement."

    Developing Until Our Last Breath was a massive undertaking for Bart and required an enormous amount of emotional capital, an investment for which he credits his wife for constantly buoying his spirits. "My wife always encouraged me, saying this story was too important to quit," Bart says. "At bumps in the road it would have been easy to say I can't do this anymore. If not for her, this book would never have been done."

    Rickie Leiter, 56, is a Longmeadow resident and cousin of Bart's who grew up with his family. "Zenia was like a second mother to me and she and my mother were like sisters," she recalls. Over the course of her childhood, she recalls that Leizer, typically a very quiet, shy individual, was very animated with her father.

    "He would share his stories about what happened during the war with my father, and as I became a teenager my parents shared more of his story with me," Leiter says. "They made it clear that Michael and Bruce, Leizer's sons, did not know these details, but felt it was important for me to understand what had happened to these two wonderful people in my life."

    Leiter feels confident that Leizer and Zenia would have been extremely proud of Bart's portrayal of their lives in his book. "Michael was able to share not only the love and travails his parents went through, but also the beautiful history, the richness of the Jewish history of Vilna," she reflects. "His book really captured both of those stories, and for me, to have known these people, makes me very proud of Michael."

    "Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance" Published by St. Martin's Press, 2008.


  • CHICO ENTERPRISE RECORD--Son of Holocaust 'partisans' to speak Monday
    Daily newspaper serving Chico and the greater mid-valley area
    By LARRY MITCHELL--Staff Writer
    Posted: 04/18/2009

  • YIVO News

    YIVO News
    "CHICO--Like most children, Michael Bart listened to his parents talk about their youth."

    "The stories told by his father and mother, Holocaust survivors Leizer and Zenia Bart, concerned an aspect of history not well known."

    "Bart said he began a quest to learn more about this history after his father's funeral in 1996. At the funeral, an elderly man told him that he should have inscribed on his parents' grave markers the Hebrew word "Nekamah," which means "Avengers."

    "The Barts were members of a Jewish band of guerilla fighters in Lithuania during the Holocaust. The group called themselves "Nekamah," which means "Avengers."

    "Over the next decade, Bart did research and wrote an award-winning book, "Until Our Last Breath."

    "He will be in Chico Monday to speak at the community Holocaust Memorial Day service. It will be held at 7:30 p.m. at Congregation Beth Israel, which is held at 7:30 at 14th and Hemlock streets. All are welcome."

    "Also, at the service, Bert Schapelhouman of Magnalia will be honored for his efforts in Holland during the Holocaust. He wound up in a concentration camp after he and other family members were caught hiding Jews in their home."

    "Bart, in a phone interview, said his father, fleeing the Nazis, emigrated from Poland to Vilna, the capital of Lithuania. There he met and married his mother."

    "In 1941, the Nazis captured Lithuania and established a ghetto in Vilna, where 35,000 Jews, including his parents, were forced to live. After it became apparent that the ghetto's entire population would eventually be killed, 150 Jews escaped the ghetto and went to live in a vast forest outside Vilna. Bart's parents were among them."

    "Bart said they obtained weapons (sometimes from the Soviets) and engaged in guerilla fighting against the Nazis. They blew up trains and military plants, dismantled railroad tracks, and ambushed and killed German soldiers. They were fighting for just under a year."

    "Their life in the forest was incredibly hard. They had to steal food from local villagers, and they never had enough to eat, Bart said. To quell hunger pangs, they would eat something called "balanda," a mixture of boiled swamp water and flour. They slept in huge underground bunkers to keep warm in the frigid winter."

    "Referring to this group of fighters, President Eisenhower remarked that "the partisans of Vilna" had a significant impact, Bart said. They were among a number of bands of "partisans" that fought throughout Europe."

    "About two-thirds of the group survived the war, Bart said. In July of 1944, when the Soviet Army took Vilna from the Germans, the Avengers joined in the fight."

    "Bart, a real-estate investor in San Diego, said his parents moved to the United States in 1948."

    "He has felt the effects of the Holocaust all of his life, he said. Not only did he hear about it from his parents, but because of it, he never met his grandparents, his uncles and aunts or any of his first cousins, he said. They were all killed."

    "Staff writer Larry Mitchell."


  • San Diego Jewish World--Masterful retelling of Shoah in Vilna
    By DONALD HARRISON, editor and publisher of San Diego Jewish World
    Volume 2, Number 133
    Posted: Tuesday, June 03, 2008

  • Click here
    San Diego Jewish World
    By DONALD HARRISON
    THE JEWISH CITIZEN

    Masterful retelling of Shoah in Vilna

    Until Our Last Breath by Michael Bart and Laurel Corona, St Martin's Press, 2008, 308 pages including end notes, U.S. $25.95.

    "SAN DIEGO--This is a history in which excellent research by Michael Bart is married to the fine writing of Laurel Corona, a writer with a straightforward style who, for the most part, lets the facts of the Holocaust speak for themselves.

    The result is an engrossing account about the parents of Michael Bart and the experience of the Jews of Vilna during the Holocaust. We glimpse their life before the war, experience the torment of the ghetto, break loose with them to the forests to join the partisans, and weep with relief when after the war they reach the safety of life in America.

    The author's parents were married just before the Nazis overran the Lithuanian ghetto, which was home to the freedom fighters. Unable to escape, they took to the surrounding forests and joined a resistance movement that challenged the mighty Nazi blitzkrieg.

    Most adult readers already are familiar with the chronology of the Nazis' genocide against the Jews; what this book does perhaps better than others is to help us understand the calculations that captive Jews made as they weighed whether this choice or that would more likely result in their staying alive.

    Life in the ghetto was not simply a passive affair, waiting for the executioner; it was a deadly chess game. The trouble was the Nazis had bishops, knights, castles, and a queen, and the Jews had but a few pawns.

    Should they report for a work assignment, or should they stay hidden in a maline (a secret hiding place in a building)? If they don't work, they won't get a ration card for food; but if they do go to work, it may be to dig their own graves in Ponary, the forest where tens of thousands of Jews were machine-gunned into pits.

    Should they try to recruit every able-bodied Jew to a resistance movement in order to have sufficient numbers, or should they keep the resistance a secret in order to better their chances of not being discovered?

    Should they attempt guerrilla warfare against the Germans in the ghetto, and possibly bring massive retaliation on the entire population, or should they wait until they can escape the city and join the partisans in the forests?

    Once in the forest, should they kill Nazi sympathizers who live on the farms they must raid for food, or should they send them away?

    Should they allow themselves to be integrated into other Partisan units of Lithuanians or Soviet fighters, or should they maintain their separate identity as Jewish fighters?

    Into these kinds of questions are woven the personal stories of Leizer Bart and Zenia Lewinson Bart, he a Polish Jew, she a Lithuanian Jew. Once her "higher class," in the view of her family, would have prevented them from making a marriage, but these were extraordinary times.

    Leizer had secretly been a member of the resistance, even while serving as a German-supervised Jewish gate guard at the ghetto. In this job, he sometimes had to make a big show of patting down someone returning from work outside the ghetto, and if indeed he felt contraband under that person's jacket, to keep right on patting without changing expression.

    But could that person be a Nazi agent, carrying the contraband to test him? If he allowed the person to pass through, would he be shot?

    As a member of the Jewish police force, Bart often fell under the suspicion of the other ghetto residents, who, not knowing of his role in the resistance, wondered if he was a collaborator with the Nazis. But eventually his judiciousness and demeanor won him a reputation among the Lithuanian Jews as "one of the good ones."

    Zenia had met him at a social affair, and was drawn to the shy man until she learned of his gate guard role. Then she wanted nothing to do with him, until friends persuaded her that he was different from the others.

    They began to spend more and more time together, never alone, because in a ghetto where strange families were required to share the rooms of small apartments, and even beds, couples were never alone. Even in the forest, where Partisans slept together in bunkers, they were not alone. Alone had to wait until after the war, but at least Leizer and Zenia were able to be together.

    And when at last Leizer told Zenia of his role in the resistance--which she did not know even existed--she decided that she would choose to join the Partisans too, even if it meant going to the forest with him and leaving her family behind in the ghetto.

    So many, many choices--but none of these choices were of their choosing."

    Harrison, editor and publisher of San Diego Jewish World, may be contacted at editor@sandiegojewishworld.com


    Glimpsing the World of Holocaust Memoir Personal History
    By Eli Rosenblatt and Marissa Brostoff
    Printed: Thu. May 22, 2008
    Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance
    "by Michael Bart and Laurel Corona (St. Martin's Press, 336 pages, $25.95) ...blend[s] a historical account of the Lithuanian Jews during the war years with an emotional account of a young group of Jewish resistance fighters led by Abba Kovner, who would live on as a Hebrew poet and unashamed Israeli noble. The strength of the narrative lies in Bart's passionate description of Vilna, Yiddishland's Baltic jewel and above all, a city where both Jewish traditions and Jewish modernisms flourished. We find a cast of characters who, while not religiously observant, exemplify a type of European Jewish lifestyle that both embraced otherness and proactively fought for social equality. A delicate, expressive story surfaces, letting Vilna sink slowly into our memories."

    "...show[s] the increasing importance of second and third generation narratives, the retelling of a parent's or grandparent's experiences during the Shoah as filtered through the descendant's research and remembrance."


  • TOGETHER: The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants:
    Until Our Last Breath: A Holocaust Story of Love and Partisan Resistance
    Volume 22, Number 2
    Circulation: 90,000
    Printed: August 2008



  • "NEW YORK--At Michael Bart's father funeral, an older man came up to Michael to tell him that the grave stone should include a reference to the Freedom Fighters of Nekamah, to honor his late father's involvement in the Jewish resistance movement in Vilna at the end of World War II. Michael had never heard the term before. After his father's death and his mother in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's, Michael embarked on a 10-year research project to find out more details about his parents' time in the Vilna Ghetto, where they met, fell in love, and married, and about their activities as members of the Jewish resistance. Until Our Last Breath is the culmination of his research, and parents' story of love and survival is seamlessly tied into the collective story of the Vilna Ghetto, the Partisans of Vilna, and the wider themes of world history.

    Zenia, Bart's mother, was born and raised in Vilna. Leizer, his father, fled to Vilna to escape the Nazi invasion of his hometown of Hrubeiszow in Poland. Zenia and Leizer were married by one of the last remaining rabbis 90 days before the liquidation of the ghetto. Leizer was friends with Zionist leader Abba Kovner, and became a member of the Vilna Ghetto underground. Shortly before the total liquidation of the ghetto, Zenia and Leizer, along with about 120 members of the underground, were able to escape and reach the Rudnicki forest about 25 miles from Vilna. They became the Jewish Partisan fighting group led by Abba Kovner who were known as the Avengers. Until Our Last Breath is intensely personal, painstakingly researched, and a lasting memorial to the Jews from Vilna, to the partisans and resistance fighters, and to the author's family."


  • THE SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE--Fading Faces of History
    The daily COPLEY NEWSPAPER serving San Diego
    By JENNIFER VIGIL--Union Tribune Staff Writer
    Printed: 04/18/2009 See the front Page A1 & A15 for the full article
    Also, Posted on SignOnSanDiego.com
  • YIVO News

    "SAN DIEGO--children of survivors also have pledged to share their stories."

    "San Diego, resident Michael Bart, wrote "Until Our Last Breath," his 2008 account of how his late parents escaped from a Jewish ghetto and joined the resistance. His curiosity took hold after his father, Leizer, died in 1996."

    "Now, Bart helps lead the committee organizing the Jewish center's day of remembrance."

    "Many years ago I didn't think too much about the Holocaust," said Bart. "Then, I became more comfortable with my background and realized I had a responsibility."

    "Holocaust survivor Gussie Zaks, who lives in San Diego, said she hopes "the second generation never lets it be forgotten."


    Until Our Last Breath - contact author Michael Bart


    Until Our Last Breath - represented by Barbara Braun & Associates


    Until Our Last Breath - published by St. Martin's Press


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