The Holocaust is memorialized on a number of different days in countries around the world. In Israel this year, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom HaShoah, begins at sundown on April 15 and continues until sundown on April 16.
Aleksandra Goode's story of enduring and surviving the Holocaust continues today in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Keller, where she works with International Guardian Angels Outreach. Goode co-founded the organization, which assists orphaned children in Russia.
Goode has a personal connection to Russia - and to being orphaned. Goode is not Jewish - she was raised in the Orthodox faith and is now an evangelical Christian. But like many gentiles in Europe, she found herself sharing the same fate as the millions of Jews and others who suffered, and often died, in Nazi concentration camps.
Born Aleksandra Maderash in 1929, Goode was the child of Russians who had emigrated to the newly created nation of Yugoslavia following the 1917 Revolution and 1917-1922 Civil War in Russia. She was still a girl when the chaos of World War II came to Yugoslavia in 1941. Goode lost both of her parents and by 1944 ended up in the Dachau, Germany, concentration camp. But she survived and eventually found her way to the United States, where she built a new life.
At the Hope Center of Greenville, Goode told her story to dozens of Northeast Texans at that charitable organization's October 2014 annual banquet and award ceremony, where Goode was the keynote speaker.
While thousands observe Holocaust Remembrance Day across the world, enjoy the complete audio of that evening's address by Goode - and share in her dramatic, humorous, heartbreaking and inspiring account of loss and redemption.
