Lev, Gidon: Let‘s Make Things Better

"Gidon Lev is eighty-eight years old. He‘s been a dance teacher and a farmer. He loves soccer, his kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids, his beloved wife of forty years, Susan, who died at age sixty-nine, and his unexpected late-in-life partner, Julie, who he met when he was eighty-one. He‘s a self-identified rascal and optimist. Gidon Lev is also a Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned for nearly four years in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Liberated when he was ten, he lost at least twenty-six members of his family in the Holocaust, including his father, grandfather, aunts and uncles. After decades of silence, Gidon first told his story of being imprisoned in Theresienstadt concentration camp at age six to a group of German high school students. What followed was nothing less than extraordinary: from that one talk, Gidon has spoken to celebrities and diplomats, took social media by storm, all with his signature bluntness, charm, and wisdom. Gidon‘s life is extraordinary not only because he is one of the few living survivors, but because of his lessons learned over nearly a century. As Gidon says, "you don‘t get the life you want, you get the life you get"-and it‘s what you do with it that counts. "Let‘s Make Things Better" is the calling card of an indomitable spirit-sharing timeless simple beliefs and truths, from reconciling with the past, standing up to hate, living for the moment, bringing people together, and where to find hope for the future. Gidon‘s ultimate lesson for all of us is that we have many opportunities, large and small, in front of us every day. And our single most readily available and possibly best purpose is to make things better-to incrementally improve what is in front of us and to leave something better behind us. This is a power that we all have, at any moment, and Gidon‘s life is a lesson of how to do it, even in the face of astonishing adversity"--