100 Days to Inspire Respect Gizel describes how she avoided being raped by her Russian liberators.

In the collective memory, the February Revolution has faded or been mixed with the October Revolution, which happened eight months later and defined the trajectory of the Russian history for the next 70 years. However, the memory of the February Revolution is preserved in several eyewitness testimonies to the Holocaust in the Visual History Archive.

English Translation of testimony clip: “The February Revolution, - that’s how I perceived it being a girl, - was a celebration. It was a fraternization! It was a jubilation! The bonds of an old order were broken: [before] you were not allowed to do this and that. If you were a nobleman, you were allowed to do everything, but if you were a burgess, you were deprived of everything. There were a lot of ties and bonds. But [the Revolution], it was such a liberation and joy! [People] were fraternizing!”

English translation:

Solly Ganor (Henkind) was born in 1927 in Silute, Lithuania. In 1941, Solly with his family was incarcerated in Kaunas ghetto. In 1944, he was deported to Stutthof concentration camp and then to Kaufering Lager X and Dachau. Solly was liberated in 1945. His father, Heim Henkind, born in 1891 in Minsk, then Russian Empire (today Belarus), was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Men’sheviks), that was emerged after the division of the Party in two groups, Men’sheviks and Bol’sheviks.

On March 8, 1917 (February 23 in the Julian calendar), in Petrograd, then the capital of the Russian Empire (today St. Petersburg), the February Revolution began. It brought about many rights and freedoms of which Russian citizens had hitherto deprived. On April 2, 1917, the Pale of Settlement, a long-term restriction on Jewish residence in the Russian Empire, was abolished.

Svetlana Ushakova currently works in the collections department at USC Shoah Foundation as a content specialist. She received her doctoral degree in Russian history at the Novosibirsk State University, Russia. She is the author and co-author of several publications on the history of Soviet ideological campaigns, social mobilization, and adaptation methods used by peasant families to survive Soviet deportation and exile.

Educators have a new slate of webinars to choose from in 2017 to enhance their knowledge and skills for using Echoes and Reflections and IWitness in the classroom.