Thank God You Are Here: The Story of Gita (Giselle) Cycowicz

Gita (Giselle) Cycowicz (née Friedman) was born in 1927 in Chust, Czechoslovakia (today Khust, Ukraine), to Wolf and Hannah Friedman. The family was observant and Zionist. Her father was a businessman and her mother a homemaker who also assisted her father in his work. She was the youngest of three daughters. After the Hungarian army occupied Khust in March, 1939, the family, together with the rest of the town's Jews, were subjected to anti-Jewish measures and actions. Following the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the Jews of Khust, including Gita, her sister Alti (Helen) and their parents, were rounded up and incarcerated in the ghetto established in the town. Around five weeks later, they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After five months of internment in the camp, she and her sister were sent to forced labor in two subcamps of Gross-Rosen. They were liberated on May 8, 1945. Gita and Alti returned to Khust where they were reunited with their mother and sister Etu (Edith), who had also survived Auschwitz. In 1948 they immigrated to the United States where Gita married Itzchak Cycowitz. She began her college education in her early forties and became a psychologist. She moved to Israel in the early 1990s, and worked at the non-profit organization Amcha, providing both individual and group psychological therapy to Holocaust survivors for over 25 years. Today she lives in Jerusalem and has three children, 21 grandchildren and a growing number of great-grandchildren.