Vivien Kalvaria

Vivien Kalvaria is a writer, former television journalist, and executive producer of the multi-award-winning documentary J’Accuse! A Cry from the Killing Pits of Lithuania.

Born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), she began her television career early, when, at twenty-four, she was appointed Weekend News Director of Southern Africa’s first television studio. Her articles for The Times of Israel and Aish explore Holocaust memory, intergenerational trauma, antisemitism, sisterhood in the camps, and the complexities of survival and forgiveness.

Her lifelong engagement with Holocaust history began at thirteen, when she played Anne Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank. My Name Is Not Rifka, part memoir and part Holocaust biography, grew from two decades of conversations with her mother-in-law, a Schindler survivor, and explores how uncovering a hidden past can profoundly change what we believe we know about those closest to us.