Two Regimes

This is a verbatim memoir of Teodora Verbitskya. Very little is known about Teodora, a gentile Russian woman who bravely chronicled the years before, during and after World War II and her experiences in Russia, including deportation to German forced labor and concentration camps.

Through it all, Teodora was a woman who strived to feed and protect her children under very severe conditions, and she did so with integrity, prayer, and perseverance. These are her thoughts of what she witnessed and lived through. Teodora and her daughters, Nadia and Lucy, were non-Jewish witnesses to the Holocaust. Teodora wrote her memoir to document that these events took place, and, more importantly, to validate that the people she knew and lost would never be forgotten. Teodora's daughter, Nadia Werbitzky, was haunted her entire life by what she had experienced. As a professional artist, Nadia used a paintbrush to express her thoughts. Nadia understood the importance of her mother's manuscript and painted some of the paintings to correlate with what her mother had written decades earlier; memories shared by both mother and daughter. Nadia painted feverishly in the last years of her life so that her story would not perish with her. We hope the impact of this book will leave a lasting impression.