Evie Litwok is the Founder and Director of Witness to Mass Incarceration (WMI), a storytelling, interviewing and organizing archival project that documents the lives of formerly incarcerated women and other LGBTQ people.
Evie Litwok
By Evie Litwok
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Community My grandparents thought Kristallnacht could never happen. We can’t make the same mistake.
On November 9th 1938, Nazi paramilitary and civilian groups carried out mass acts of violence against synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses, and Jewish homes. The broken glass found on the streets the next day would define this moment as “Kristallnacht,” the night of broken glass. A short time after Kristallnacht, my grandfather Israel Kohn and other Jewish…
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Community People say coronavirus is like prison. I can tell you: it’s not.
I live in New York City which is at the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. I wear a face mask to walk my dog every day. People pass by and our dogs sniff each other while we chat from a social distance, and more than one dog owner has told me that they feel like…
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Community My mother was a Holocaust survivor, but she was always more worried about my happiness.
My 93-year-old mom, who survived the Holocaust, died of COVID-19 in an assisted living facility in New Jersey on April 5. I found out she was dead from a text with the words Baruch Dayan Haemet, the Jewish blessing at the time of death. Only days earlier, my nephew called to tell me she had…
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Community Prison Is No Place For The Elderly — Even Paul Manafort
Paul Manafort is in hell tonight. I know because I was there too. I was 60 years old when I entered prison; Paul Manafort entered jail as a senior at age 69. It is frightening to be locked up the first time, knowing the nightmare is just beginning. People applauded Paul Manafort’s arrest. Most of…
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Community We Have Not Yet Learned The Lessons Of The Holocaust
I am a formerly incarcerated Jewish lesbian and the daughter of two survivors of the Holocaust. In past years on Yom HaShoah, I watched my parents light candles and testify about their experience. Every time they spoke they relived the horrors they endured. For some seventy years, they, all survivors and the world, said “never…
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Culture How Surviving Solitary Confinement Changed My Life
From the look on her face, and the way she entered my room, I knew my mother was about to say something serious. Leaning against her walker, she watched me move closer to her. “It will be harder for you to be in prison than it was for me to be in a concentration camp,”…
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