AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT WITH AUTHOR LESLIE GELRUBIN BENITA. [BIOGRAPHIES & MEMOIR, HISTORICAL, HOLOCAUST]

MEET THE AUTHOR: LESLIE GELRUBIN BENITAH

Leslie Benitah is a journalist, filmmaker, author, and third-generation Holocaust survivor

She is dedicated to preserving memory, amplifying survivor voices, and combating antisemitism, historical denial, and misinformation through storytelling and education.

Holding a PhD in Journalism from the Sorbonne, Leslie began her career in France, where she spent more than two decades in television and media. As an Executive Producer for TF1, France’s leading television network, she developed and produced primetime programming reaching millions of viewers. After moving to Miami in 2006, she served as Editor-in-Chief of a leading French-language publication before returning to documentary filmmaking.

Leslie is the founder of The Last Ones Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to recording the testimonies of the last living Holocaust survivors and transforming their stories into films, books, digital experiences, and educational resources for younger generations. Through The Last Ones, she has helped document hundreds of survivor testimonies across the United States, Europe, and Israel, creating an extensive archive designed to preserve firsthand memory as the survivor generation disappears.

Her documentary work includes The Last Ones of Auschwitz, which has been presented in schools, universities, cultural institutions, and at the United Nations. She is also the author of The Last Ones of Auschwitz, a book bringing together the voices and stories of Holocaust survivors for future generations.

Today, The Last Ones’ educational resources reach thousands of teachers and schools and have generated more than one million hours of viewing. Leslie regularly speaks to students, educators, and community audiences, advocating for a new approach to Holocaust education that goes beyond remembrance alone, using firsthand testimony, technology, and storytelling to give young people the tools to recognize and confront antisemitism, misinformation, and hate.

For Leslie, preserving memory is not simply about documenting the past. It is about making that memory relevant, accessible, and powerful enough to shape how the next generation understands and responds to the world around them.

Bubbeh Meisse!
My Quest to Uncover My Family's Holocaust Story!
Biographies & Memoir!
Historical!
Holocaust!

THE EMOTIONAL PROMISE

Some family stories are inherited. Others have to be discovered.

In Bubbeh Meisse: My Quest to Uncover My Family's Holocaust Story, Leslie Gelrubin Benitah takes readers beyond the familiar boundaries of a survivor memoir.

This is the story of a granddaughter searching for the lives her grandparents were unable or unwilling to describe. It is a journey into archives, forgotten places, family graves, lost homes, and painful questions, and ultimately, it is a search for something even more profound:

Who were they before history erased so much of who they were?

 THE STORY / CURIOSITY BUILD

• Four grandparents.
• One devastating history.
• Generations of unanswered questions.

Leslie travels to Poland to follow clues her family left behind, meeting archivists and genealogists and tracing the physical places connected to her ancestors.

* She discovers her great-great-grandfather's home.

* She uncovers the graves of family members.

* She visits the Chełmno extermination camp.

* She investigates a family building lost during the Holocaust.

And with every discovery, another question emerges.

What else has been hidden?

The deeper she goes, the more she realizes that uncovering the past isn't simply about finding names and dates.

It is about confronting trauma.

* Identity.

* Loss.

* Love.

* Memory.

And the silence that can survive long after the people who experienced history are gone.

EMOTIONAL TURN

What would you do if the answers to your family's history were waiting somewhere in the world, but someone had spent a lifetime hiding them?

Would you stop searching? Or would you keep going?

Leslie chose to keep going, and what she uncovered became a journey of remembrance, confrontation, and reclamation. Because remembering isn't always comfortable; sometimes, remembering is an act of courage, an act of love, or an act of resistance.

If you're planning to join our next session, this is the perfect time to start Bubbeh Meisse: My Quest to Uncover My Family's Holocaust Story

Nothing feels better than being part of a discussion and knowing every twist

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