Livia Rothkirchen (1922–2013)

Livia Rothkirchen was born to a Jewish family in Sevljuš, a town in the Carpathian Ruthenia region that was then in Czechoslovakia. The family owned land and vineyards. At home they spoke Hungarian and German, and Livia learned Czech in school. In 1939, after Nazi Germany had seized the Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia, the Sevljuš area was annexed by Hungary. By the time Livia qualified for university in 1942, during World War II, Jews were no longer allowed higher education as part of the harsh anti-Semitic persecution. In 1944, Germany occupied Hungary and the Rothkirchens and their relatives were deported along with thousands of other Jews to the Auschwitz death camp.

Livia and her three sisters survived. After the war, she studied Russian and English languages and literature at the Charles University in Prague, and earned a doctoral degree in 1949. She struggled to immigrate to Israel, finally succeeding in 1956, and joined the staff at Yad Vashem. Eventually, she became an editor of Yad Vashem Studies, its scholarly journal and research flagship, publishing nine volumes in Hebrew and English over 15 years. At the same time, she was a pioneering researcher, historian, and author of international repute, specializing in the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia. Her first book was The Destruction of Slovak Jewry: A Documentary History (1961). Further works included The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust (2005). Dr. Rothkirchen also authored and co-authored numerous scholarly articles. She served as the editor of Moshe Sandberg’s My Longest Year: In the Hungarian Labour Service and in the Nazi Camps (1972), and co-editor of The Catastrophe of European Jewry (1973) and Deep-Rooted Yet Alien: Some Aspects of the History of the Jews in Subcarpathian Ruthenia (1979).