A life story between clouds of terror and lies — by Holocaust survivor, author, and painter Guta Tyrangiel Benezra.
"Part historical witness, part philosophical reflection — a moving inquiry into trauma, truth, and the unbroken human spirit."
Smuggled out of a labor camp as a toddler, raised under a false name in Communist Poland, and reclaimed decades later — this memoir traces one woman's journey from a hidden child to a legal scholar, painter, and author.
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Written as a Socratic dialogue, this essay searches for the roots of antisemitism and the meaning of Guta's own survival and Jewish heritage. Published by Éditions Maïa; also translated into Hebrew.
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Guta's first book: poems and autobiographical narratives paired with her own paintings, published in Ottawa in English, French and Polish.
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Guta's childhood was marked by Nazi barbarity, her youth by a communist, antisemitic Poland. Her adult life unfolds across Western countries, where other obstacles await her. It is in Israel that she chooses to spend her final years, alongside her daughters and grandchildren. Here she reveals her fate as a wandering Jew — four names, four different countries — not by choice, but by necessity.
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The Hebrew edition of Guta's memoir VRAI… MENT! — a narrative that searches for the meaning of her survival and Jewish heritage. One reader called it "a Holocaust story told from an original and profound angle unlike anything else I've read."
Order NowGuta Tyrangiel Benezra is a Holocaust survivor, author, and painter, born in Poland and shaped by decades of wandering across France, Canada, and Israel. Before turning to painting and writing, she built a first career as a law professor and lawyer — and, as a young woman in Poland, was a junior athletics champion.
She began painting in 1992, self-taught, and has exhibited across Poland, France, Canada, and Israel ever since — including a solo show at the Polish Library of Paris and a group exhibition at Yad Vashem. Her paintings and writing move together: her first book paired poems with her own canvasses, as well as in the documentary she made with her daughter, Patricia Benezra, fusing memories and art — winning the Grand Prize of Art Education at UNESCO's FIFAP festival in 1995.
After the war, her Jewish uncle Meyer spent years negotiating, being asked to pay a substantial ransom, to bring her back into her biological family. Jozio, her Polish savior, remained a lifelong presence for her. She went on to study law in Warsaw, where, as a young sportswoman, she set her Jewish identity aside entirely, moving between Catholicism and Communism like everyone around her. It was only when she visited and stayed in France — living for a time at the Home Laure Weil in Strasbourg, a residence for Holocaust survivors — that she began, slowly, to reclaim her own story. "I was genetically Jewish but culturally Polish," she has said of that period. Grateful to the Polish family who raised her, she later brought Jozio to France, married a Moroccan Jew, raised two children, and built her legal career across France, Canada, and Israel.
Guta and her sister Esther with their parents, Rachel and Moshe.
Guta with her cousin in the Mińsk Mazowiecki Ghetto, August 1942.
Guta with her adoptive parents in Poland.
Meir Tyrangiel and Jozef Jaszczuk with Guta, Łódź, 1947.
Junior athletics champion, 1957.
"Her writing focuses on historical memory, ethics, antisemitism, and human resilience."
Her writing is grounded in lived, first-hand history — the ghetto, the false name, and the return to a Jewish identity that had simply been unknown to her.
VRAI… MENT! unfolds as a Socratic dialogue, questioning how hatred is inherited and passed down — what she describes as a kind of epigenetic transmission of antisemitism.
Words and canvas have always worked together in her practice — her first book paired poems directly with her own paintings.
Grand Prize of Art Education, FIFAP Festival, UNESCO Paris — for the documentary When My Memory Became Painting, made with her daughter Patricia Benezra
Published Mémoire Bariolée, Poetic Paintings (Legas, Ottawa) — poems and autobiographical narratives illustrated with her own paintings
Interviewed for the French documentary L'écriture et la guerre, produced by the city of Toulouse
Documentary broadcast on Israeli television
Published L'Ombre des préjugés, autobiographical essay (Éditions L'Harmattan)
Published VRAI… MENT! (Éditions Maïa)
Published זהות אנוסה, Hebrew edition (Resling, Tel Aviv)
Published My Silence Cries Loudly, English memoir
Alongside her writing, Guta has painted since 1992 — a second, self-taught language for memory, shown in galleries from Warsaw to Tel Aviv to Paris.
Real reviews from readers and the press.
