CHILD HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR, RAISED CATHOLIC, REFLECTS ON The Nostra Aetate

Published: Oct. 22, 2015, 5 p.m.

Please join host Frankie Picasso on Thursday, October 22nd at 1:00 pm EST as she goes on a Mission Unstoppable with guest Lucia Weitzman a child survivor of the holocaust. As Hitlers armies began to gather up the Polish Jews, Lucia’s parents feared for her safety and rightly so. In their attempt to escape, they decided it best to leave Lucia behind, hidden in plain site. They gave her to a childless Polish Catholic couple to raise as their own, always hoping that they might meet again after the war, but Poland was hardest hit by the Nazis. There were no survivors left behind. Lucia was born in Bochnia, Poland in 1940. Her Jewish parents perished in the Holocaust and Lucia was raised in the Catholic Church by her adopted parents the Swiateks. Lucia loved the church and had deep and spiritual faith. When she learned that she too was a Jew, she really had no idea what that meant, beyond knowing that everyone hated the Jews. As she grew older, Lucia began suffering anti semitism as a lone Jew in Bochnia, and eventually concluded that she would never be able to marry or have children if she stayed. After escaping detention by Communist authorities in 1961, she immigrated to the United States and married Herman Weitzman, a Holocaust survivor and businessman raised in a traditional Jewish family Lucia’s life has been documented in her new book The Rose Temple , written by her son Mitchell, which tells an incredible tale of survival, loss, and a love for God that would spur a spiritual search  across the world , not once but several times as she sought answers to life’s most pressing questions.