Laura Markowitz, project producer for AZPM’s Children of the Holocaust series, will be the featured speaker at the Friends of SaddleBrooke Libraries lecture on Thursday, March 21, at the DesertView Theater.
Nancy McCluskey-Moore
On Thursday, March 21, at 4 p.m. in the DesertView Theater, the Friends of SaddleBrooke Libraries (FSL) lecture will feature Laura Markowitz, project producer for the Arizona Public Media(AZPM) series Children of the Holocaust. The lecture is free for members of Friends of SaddleBrooke Libraries and $5 for nonmembers to attend.
From 1941 to 1945, Germany’s Nazi regime murdered two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. Of the six million Jews who were victims of this genocide, known as the Holocaust, an estimated 1.5 million were children. Against all odds, some children managed to survive.
Markowitz interviewed 20 child survivors of the Holocaust who now live in Southern Arizona. Some experienced the horrors of concentration camps. Some survived by hiding in attics, barns, and holes in the ground or were able to pass as Gentiles. Others fled with their families and became refugees, with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Their first-hand accounts describe the brutality they witnessed and the acts of kindness that saved them.
This multi-platform, living-history project documents one of the darkest periods in human history—before this generation is gone and their stories are lost to us forever.
Markowitz has been a contributing producer for AZPM since 2009, covering education, the environment, social justice, and more for NPR 89.1 and PBS-6. Trained in family therapy so she could better cover the mental health fields, Laura became senior editor of the magazine Psychotherapy Networker, winning a National Magazine Award for writing. She was editor-in-chief of In the Family, an award-winning magazine covering LGBTQ family and mental health issues, and she was a regular contributor to Glamour, Ms., Utne Reader, and many other publications. She also coedited The Art of Psychotherapy and The Evolving Therapist.
After relocating to Arizona in 2002, she shifted from magazine feature writing to book writing and editing and multimedia production. In 2012 she published a critically acclaimed young adult novel called Book of the Sky God. More recently, she coauthored Voices on the Economy: How Open-Minded Exploration of Rival Perspectives Can Spark Solutions to Our Urgent Economic Problems (2022) and a forthcoming book about racism called Facing the White Shadow. From February through April 2024, she will be the Pima County Library Writer in Residence.