The Years in Between

Elsie Slonim was a Jewish who was born in America during the I. World War. In 1939, she has met her husband in America who was, at that time, a businessman located in Cyprus and they moved together to Cyprus. As a Jewish, she had deeply experienced the pain of the II. World War as she lost all her relatives except for her immediate family members, her father, mother and sister, in the Holocaust.

During the II. World War, they had been sent to Israel, Palestinian at that time, as refugees by the British Government in Cyprus. However, they returned back to Cyprus after the war.

She lost her husband and her two children between 2005 and 2011. When I first met her in 2015, she was 98 years old and she was the only civilian living in the military Buffer Zone, which separates two communities in Cyprus, created after the war in 1974. She could only be visited with special permission from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

After her first book ‘Lemons from Paradise’ published in 2012, which was about her life in between America, Austria, Cyprus and Israel, she published her second book ‘Ahead of Time’ in 2017. She was working on her new book when she died at the age of 103 on 26 January 2021.