104-year-old Holocaust survivor photographed with her 400 descendants down the generations

The New York Post reports that a Holocaust survivor celebrated her 104th birthday earlier this month in Jerusalem and was photographed in the Old City surrounded by her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who number approximately 400 descendants. The paper has called the photograph an example of “triumph over evil” .

Shoshana Ovitz survived Auschwitz 74 years ago, according to the Israeli news server Walla. According to her grandson, Meir Rosenstein, who told his grandmother’s story to reporter Sivan Rahav Meir, she was separated from her mother there, who was immediately sent to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who performed deadly experiments on the prisoners. 

After surviving the Holocaust, Shoshana met the man who would later become her husband, Dov Ovitz, whose wife and four daughters had been murdered during the genocide. The Ovitzes lived in Austria after the war and kept searching for any other surviving relatives.

Eventually they settled in Haifa, Israel, where they raised two daughters and two sons. Ovitz had one wish for her birthday this year, and that was for all her descendants to assemble in Jerusalem.

“We don’t have an exact number, but there are probably 400 descendants here,” Panini Friedman, her oldest granddaughter, told the Walla news server. The family reunion was reportedly an emotional occasion.