“Black curtains cover the windows.

“The mood is very somber. 

“The door opens, and in walks a 10-year-old little girl: Freda.”

So begins Leora Lazarus’ story of the lives of Freda, her mother; Riva and Yoshuah, her great-grandparents who were were last seen in the Vilna Ghetto in December 1942; and Dovid and Essia, an uncle and aunt killed in the Lida Massacre in 1941.

The recorded retelling of their lives is not just a story of one family, but also Lazarus’ way of giving voice to those who perished during the Shoah and fulfilling a promise she made as a girl to her grandmother — to educate the next generation and to make sure that the tragedies that befell so many Jewish families never happen again.

Lazarus’ lifelong quest to meet that promise took a great leap forward when, in 2020, she saw a presentation about storytelling by Teach the Shoah. Since that introduction, her participation in workshops and presentations organized by Teach the Shoah has been “life-changing and transformative,” said Lazarus, a longtime teacher.

“Teach the Shoah has given me so many avenues to explore so many different ways of telling my family story, and each time I tell a story, I find more and more connections and more and more places to look to find out more about the stories that I tell,” she said.

Educated at Barkly House Teachers Training College in Cape Town, South Africa, Lazarus is a bestselling author of Jewish-themed books and a longtime teacher who has taught in both Africa and the United States. She once ran, in San Diego, a free mobile preschool, called Play To Learn. Students affectionately called her “Teacher Lee.”

As an educator, said Lazarus, she always told stories. “I am that teacher that gets into a Moses costume and runs around and does the Exodus story,” she said. “So I feel like I’ve always been a storyteller. However, I never had the title ‘storyteller.’”

Lazarus had been telling stories online and in the books she authored when she volunteered to tell a story for a presentation by Teach the Shoah. She was “hooked” as she listened to other people’s stories, and her appetite for telling her family’s story grew.

So has her drive to conduct more research into her family’s history.

That drive, Lazarus said, began when she was just 10 years old and scouring the local phonebook for people with similar names to hers in the Jewish community in South Africa where she was raised.

“I used to call them up and say, ‘Hello, my name is Leora. And I saw your telephone number in the phonebook, and you have a similar name to mine and I’m trying to find my family. Are you part of my family?’” she said. “And 100 percent of the time, everybody said no.”

Her grandmother hesitated to share her experiences, but sometimes would say something that became a guidepost for research, said Lazarus. Her mother has been a primary source, writing a testimony about her family’s history.

“My mother actually remembers the day my grandfather got the telegraph saying that he was the only member of the family left,” said Lazarus.

Once, she posted her great-aunt Rosa’s picture on Facebook in hopes that someone seeing it might have information. Someone did respond, sending Lazarus a copy of her great-aunt’s displaced-persons certificate that confirmed that her aunt was in Stuttgart, Germany, when the war ended.

“Because none of my family’s information is documented, I have had to put together a lot of information on my own,” she said.

Lazarus also tells stories about Rosa and her great-uncle’s wife, Esther. But there are still gaps to fill in. For example, her mother does not know if her grandparents were still alive in December 1942, when she was born.

“My mom’s not so young anymore,” said Lazarus. “I still strive to try and find answers for her to try and help her get some closure on her grandparents and her aunts and uncles.”