Gabriella Karin

Prepared by the Witnesses of War team

Gabriella Karin was born Gabriella Foldes on 17 November 1930 in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, to Jewish parents Arpad and Sari Foldes, who owned a delicatessen. As anti-Jewish persecution intensified under the Slovak regime, her parents obtained false identity papers and enrolled her in the Ursuline convent school in Bratislava in 1941, concealing her Jewish identity. Separated from her family, she lived with the constant fear that her parents might disappear.

Her mother worked with the Slovak underground, obtaining advance information about deportations and warning Jewish families before the authorities arrived. Gabriella sometimes accompanied her on these dangerous visits, witnessing the distress of people facing deportation.

In 1944, Gabriella and her parents went into hiding with five others in the small Bratislava apartment of Karol Blanar, a young lawyer who risked his life to shelter them. Their hiding place stood across the street from the headquarters of the security police. For approximately nine months, the eight Jewish fugitives remained concealed, restricting their movements and keeping quiet to avoid discovery. Gabriella passed long hours reading, while occasionally witnessing arrests through a small opening in the covered windows. All eight survived until Soviet troops liberated Bratislava in April 1945.

After the war, Gabriella studied fashion design and married František Lederer, later known as Ofer Karin, in 1948. They moved to Israel in 1949 and subsequently settled in Los Angeles in 1960. After a career in fashion, Gabriella turned to sculpture, creating works reflecting persecution, loss, survival and remembrance.

She also worked to secure recognition for her rescuer, who was posthumously honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations in 2006. Through her artwork, school visits and testimony at Holocaust Museum Los Angeles, Gabriella has shared both her experiences and the story of the man whose courage saved her family.