New Evidence Reveals Vilunya Diskin's Family Experience of the Holocaust
At age 83, Our Bodies Ourselves co-founder Vilunya Diskin has finally found out what happened to the family she lost in the Holocaust.
Her Jewish birth parents placed baby Vilunya in the care of a Catholic neighbor to hide her from the authorities. Their act saved her life, but Vilunya never saw her birth parents again.
After the end of World War II, a local rabbi took her and other orphaned children from Lviv (in current-day Ukraine) to the United States, to escape continued antisemitism under the Soviet regime. A Jewish couple adopted Vilunya, who grew up in California.
For her whole life, Vilunya sought traces of the loved ones she had been separated from. Her experience of oppression moved her to join the civil rights movement, and later to become part of the Boston Women's Health Book Collective. But her personal past remained mysterious to her.
She uncovered nothing until the Holocaust Recovery Project reconstructed Vilunya's family tree from her DNA. “The women's movement has always said that knowledge is power," she reflects. "And that's exactly right." Vilunya found it deeply moving to finally learn her birth parents' full names, the identities of her grandparents, and the fate of her twin sister, who had died in infancy. She now has photos of them, and a feeling of power from knowing more about her own family history.
“In many ways, it's like a rebirth," she told the Boston Globe. “Here I am in my 80s and it's a whole new chapter."