Yaffa Eliach, "who as a four-year-old survived the Nazi massacres of Jews in her Lithuanian town, and went on to document their daily life in a kaleidoscopic book and a haunting, three-story canyon of photographs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington," died November 8, the New York Times reported. She was 79.
Eliach assembled hundreds of the photographs and oral histories into her book There Once Was a World: A 900-Year Chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok, which was published by Little, Brown in 1998 and was a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Award. She also wrote Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust.