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Yolanda Avram Willis
Yolanda Avram Willis was born in Greece in 1934. She was six years old when World War II began in Greece. During the war, she and her family were hidden in Crete and in several loc...ver maisYolanda Avram Willis was born in Greece in 1934. She was six years old when World War II began in Greece. During the war, she and her family were hidden in Crete and in several locations in Athens. When she was eight, her family was forced to disperse. Two different Greek Orthodox families hid her until she was ten at liberation. The first family to hide her became fugitives, just like her own Jewish family.
She came to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship, graduated with honor and earned an MA degree in chemistry. After her third child was born, she received an MA and a PhD in sociology and worked in industry as a researcher, manager, educator, and management consultant for twenty-two years. In 1994, she began collecting oral histories from Greek Holocaust survivors and rescuers.
Dr. Willis lectures nationally, speaking of righteous Greeks from personal experience. In 1996, she was the associate producer of a documentary film, It Was Nothing, It Was Everything, focusing on ten Greek rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, including one of her own in Crete. Her writing has been published in several collections, including Flares of Memory, an anthology published by Oxford University Press in 2001. In addition to serving as speaker, panelist, and board member, she was an interviewer for Steven Spielberg’s Visual History Foundation. She has taught courses on Rescuers and Hidden Children at Carnegie Mellon’s Osher Institute for Lifelong Learning and at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh. Yolanda is proudest of her three adult children and seven granddaughters, several of whom accompanied her on return trips to Greece, where they visited her rescuing places and met Yolanda’s rescuing families. Eight of her rescuers were recognized by Yad Vashem (Israel) as Righteous among the Nations.ver menos