Gabriella Kovac is a public speaker, speaking coach, and best-selling author of Holocaust Memoirs: Survivor stories from the darkest days of the Holocaust. She is the daughter of a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Hungary.
Gabriella’s work is inspired by the lessons taught to her about strength, resilience, and compassion in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Second World War. She has become dedicated to helping people develop the skills and confidence needed to overcome adversity in a complicated, and often cruel, world.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Gabriella Kovac about helping people overcome adversity.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- How believing in yourself creates a magical bubble that protects you.
- Why people should see the abundance around them instead of having a scarcity mentality.
- How having a best-selling memoir can create many business opportunities.
- Why it’s therapeutic to address the bad things that happened in our past.
- How magic is created when people write their memoirs.
Connect with Gabriella:
Links Mentioned:
gabriellakovac.com
Guest Contact Info:
Facebook
facebook.com/events/1263808857163598
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/gabriellakovac
Rob Kosberg:
All right. Hey, welcome everybody. Rob Kosberg here with another episode of our Publish. Promote. Profit podcast. I’m always excited to be with you. I have a great guest who wrote an inspiring, powerful legacy book. Gabriela Kovac is a public speaker, speaking coach, and bestselling author of Holocaust memoirs, Survivor Stories from the Darkest Days of the Holocaust. She’s the daughter of a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Hungary. Her work is inspired by lessons taught to her about strength, resilience, compassion in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the second world war. She’s become dedicated now to public speaking and teaching people, helping to develop skills and confidence needed to overcome adversity, which we all face in a complicated and often cruel world. So, Gabriela, thank you for being with us today, excited to have you on the podcast.
Gabriella Kovac:
Oh, thank you very much for inviting me. I think that’s absolutely wonderful.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, great to have you here. Thanks for being here from the other side of the world. You of course live in Sydney, Australia now. We were just chatting about that. I’m over here in the states, in Florida, and I’d like to dive right in. I’m from a Jewish background myself and I’m always intrigued by stories like this. Unfortunately, I think for many of us looking back in our histories, there’s all kinds of successes and achievements and overcoming adversity, but oftentimes our ancestors haven’t left us a memoir, but you have. I wonder, what motivated you to write it in the first place? Tell me a little bit about what that was like? It must have been very challenging as well. So, talk first about the motivation to actually write the book.
Gabriella Kovac:
Well, the main motivation is that since I was a very little girl, I watched my mother and the way she handled adversities and incredible obstacles, and I was absolutely fascinated. She kept saying that she’s in a magic bubble and nothing will harm her. I didn’t understand. I wrote the book because I wanted to understand myself or what this is about. I thought if I dieted down and put it in writing in front of others, I might get more understanding. Once I started doing the public speaking, I’m getting more and more understanding of what the magic bubble is. It’s an amazing adventure I’m having as well.
Rob Kosberg:
So, I’m intrigued. What is the magic bubble? What do you mean by that? These are part of the lessons about strength and resilience, I assume. Tell me what she shared about her magic bubble.
Gabriella Kovac:
Well, it all goes back to my grandfather. He kept telling her, since she was a very little girl, that she was a princess. She’s beautiful, intelligent, and nothing can harm her because she is in a magic bubble. For her, it wasn’t a belief, it was a total knowledge. So if you look at it, me translating it, I think it’s a total self-confidence given to you by your parents that you can do, and nothing can harm you. Within that, you can think you can act. It’s a total knowingness, I think, about yourself and you can achieve in life.
Rob Kosberg:
Certainly, that must’ve been shaken during what she went through, during the Holocaust.
Gabriella Kovac:
I’m saying it was not shaken because she just went through it. She talked about all the things that happened to her. I’ve actually personally seen some of the things that she did, and it was magic. There’s no words for it. It was just magical.
Rob Kosberg:
Not everyone grows up hearing that they’re a beautiful and a princess and nothing will ever harm them. Right?
Gabriella Kovac:
That’s what I’m talking about. That’s why I keep talking about it. You can only gain it by believing in yourself.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s part of what you speak on. That’s part of the idea of the strength and resilience that you talk about.
Gabriella Kovac:
Yes. Definitely. That’s what it’s about. That’s what I talk about, that you can achieve with yourself. If you have no doubts about yourself and you believe, you are able to do that.
Rob Kosberg:
What was it like in the writing process of the book? Did you interview your mom? Was it just story, after story, after story and how she handled the stories? What was the actual writing process like, with you?
Gabriella Kovac:
Well, unfortunately she passed away, but before she passed away, originally, I wrote down, I think it was about seven pages, and I gave it to her and I said, “Mom is this true?” She looked at me, she said, “A lifetime, seven pages, pretty much.” That’s the person she was. Then of course, I expanded it and put more around it. That’s how the book became a book.
Rob Kosberg:
How did you put more around it? Did you do research? What was the process?
Gabriella Kovac:
I did a lot of research and I found in the research that everything that she did tell me was true. It was amazing. Yeah. A lot of it was after, because we also, it’s not enough that we went through the Holocaust, we also went through communism. She had several businesses. Would you believe that?
Rob Kosberg:
During communism?
Gabriella Kovac:
Yep. We were very wealthy because she had all of these businesses that she, you call it the black market. I just call it incredible intuition.
Rob Kosberg:
Isn’t that illegal in a communist country? Didn’t she risk imprisonment?
Gabriella Kovac:
She did go to prison once for 10 days, but they couldn’t hold her. So, they just let her walk out of the most infamous prison in Hungary called the house of terror. I went back to Hungary and got the documentation that it did happen. It was the Nazi headquarters before and then it became the interrogation for Budapest. I was surprised.
Rob Kosberg:
Did you write much about communism itself? Did you write much about escaping that? Your mom and your family obviously escaped it. You escaped to Australia and grew up, for the most part, in Australia where you currently reside. Tell me about what that journey looked like.
Gabriella Kovac:
That was again, as I keep saying, she was an amazing person. We had a revolution in Hungary that I mentioned to you, early in 1956. During that revolution, she said, “That’s it. I’m not going to stay in a country where they kill each other every 10 years. I want to go somewhere where it’s warmer.”
Rob Kosberg:
She sounds like she had a wonderful sense of humor.
Gabriella Kovac:
An incredible sense of humor. At the same time, she was just very nice, a very friendly person. She could achieve anything by being very nice. Don’t forget, we did have a lot of money. So, after the revolution failed, she went to the Hungarian government and said, “I like to have 12 visas please to Australia, how much?”
Rob Kosberg:
They gave her a price and she paid it.
Gabriella Kovac:
That’s exactly right. We came legally with quite a bit of money to Australia. Not that it lasted, but we did come with a passport, with clothes, with paintings to Australia. Then the challenges started because we didn’t speak the language. We didn’t know what to do. We lived in a garage for about nine months, but anyway, we were here and then life restarted and then she did quite well in Australia. There is just another little bit of thing that I wanted to tell you and share with you of her personality. I got married. She said to my husband, “I want to buy you a house.” He said, “No.” She said, “But I think that I want to buy my daughter a house,” and he said, “You know what, if you won the lottery, you can do that.” A week later, she won the lottery.
Rob Kosberg:
Sounds like she was able to do whatever she put her mind to.
Gabriella Kovac:
Then she played games with it because she could. That’s what I’m saying. It was just an incredible thing to watch.
Rob Kosberg:
So you wrote a memoir. For someone to read it obviously, there’s an entertainment value in reading a memoir. You’re learning, you’re growing, you’re experiencing the ups and downs that somebody else experienced. Does your book also lay out a path for other people to gain strength and resilience? Do you talk about how to do that within your book or is that part of what you speak on?
Gabriella Kovac:
No. She had some interesting Proverbs that she followed, that she learned from her father. I think that’s one of the main things that I do pass on as a message. One of them is, never ever show fear. Even a dog can smell it and it will bite you. I’ve watched her do that many times. If somebody attacked her, or wanted to harm her, she went straight. She didn’t show fear. It was, and I’ve learned that I had an experience myself once and it just came to me and I handled it. If you can handle fear, if you can handle somebody who is attacking you, or is trying to dominate, and you don’t show the fear, they crumble. It’s an amazing way of handling it.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s a great proverb. What are some of the other ones, do you recall some of the other ones off hand?
Gabriella Kovac:
Yes. There’s another one that she operated on all the time, “The streets are paved with gold. You just have to know how to pick it up.”
Rob Kosberg:
Nice. So the idea that opportunity is all around you and you should look at it with abundance rather than with a scarcity mentality.
Gabriella Kovac:
There’s another one also that, and you could see it because, after she was sent into the prison and was questioned for 10 days, she just walked out. She already knew that she was going to start something else and did. The proverb on that, that she followed was, “Next to every door that closes, another one will open.” If you look at life and everyone’s life, how many doors have you opened?
Rob Kosberg:
Very true. Speaking about open doors, you were sharing with me about opportunities that have come up because of the best-selling memoir that you wrote. It’s going to be made into a play. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on there. That’s happening in Australia right now.
Gabriella Kovac:
Yes, it is. I was invited first by somebody else to do a play then I changed it. I’ve written it with somebody else. It’s basically a very true story about her, what she did, and also about a very accurate historical fact about what happened in Hungary. It’s a thing not many people know about, and it’s an amazing story both ways. Because of COVID, we already wanted to open it once now in August, which can’t be happening. We’ve got all the actors waiting, they’re wanting to do this. I got invited to a very nice place in the suburbs called Five Dock. It’s now going to be opening. They invited me because it’s a club, it’s a return soldiers club. They are sponsoring it and they are handling all the ticketing and we invited them to put the show on for them.
Rob Kosberg:
Wonderful. Congratulations on that.
Gabriella Kovac:
Then we’ll see where it takes from there on. I would love to have a movie. I think it should be a movie because it’s inspirational. It’s different. It’s historical.
Rob Kosberg:
Let me ask you this, what was maybe the biggest lesson that you learned in writing the book? Whether it was something about your own need to have determination to finish the book, writing a book is difficult, or if it was something that you learned about your mother or about being resilient yourself through the process. Just what were your biggest lessons from writing this Holocaust memoir?
Gabriella Kovac:
Being able to confront what happened. It is reliving it and confronting this, what happened in the past. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it’s very therapeutic.
Rob Kosberg:
Tell me about that. How was it therapeutic? Obviously confronting those kinds of demons, how has it been therapeutic for you?
Gabriella Kovac:
I feel that regardless of any challenge that comes up in today, I don’t buckle down. I handle it. I don’t have a problem with it. I really don’t. It doesn’t matter what it is, doesn’t matter how threatening it is, I know I can overcome it and I can face it.
Rob Kosberg:
Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s really well said. After facing those kinds of issues and those horrible cruel challenges, of course, the smaller problems of life should be able to just crumble before you.
Gabriella Kovac:
Exactly. That’s been a problem with some people. There’s another saying that my mother said, which is very beautiful as well. I don’t remember her ever saying a bad word about anyone. It is, “Never ever look into the darkness or you will succumb.” If you look into the darkness, you will succumb, or it will devour away. Don’t ever look into the darkness. I think that’s one of the most beautiful things. I watch people in today’s world that small things happen to them and they’re off to the doctor, and they are on pills and they can’t handle anything else in their lives because something has shaken it. Instead of taking a lesson from it and moving on, they actually succumb, which is just so very, very sad to me.
Rob Kosberg:
What would you say to somebody that wants to write their own memoir. Maybe it’s a legacy book. They want to write about their business. They want to write their life lessons, their success lessons, pass it onto their children, their future generations, but they’ve been, they haven’t done it for one reason or another? What would you say to that person that is considering writing a book like this?
Gabriella Kovac:
Well, I think that you just go out there and do it. There’s magic in it once you start. A lot of different philosophers have said this, once you start and you’re willing to go to the other end, magic happens. That’s what I found with me. If you don’t stop, if you don’t let the dark consume in you in any way, but just keep going, you find magic. Magic is within different doors opening for you. Why did it become, why then I had altered, why did I meet somebody who was brilliant on how to put things onto Amazon? How did I become a best-selling book? How did I get someone to invite us, to put the play on? Do you know? It’s all magic. It is believing in yourself and seeing it to the end is magic in it.
Rob Kosberg:
Wonderful. Well said. So Gabriela, where can people learn more about you as a public speaker? Obviously, they can go to Amazon and buy the book. Again, it’s called Holocaust Memoirs.
Gabriella Kovac:
Actually I’ve got a copy of it. I can put it up for you.
Rob Kosberg:
Good. Put it up. We’ll also give a link to the book.
Gabriella Kovac:
There you are. That’s what it looks like. Can you see it?
Rob Kosberg:
We can. Very nice.
Gabriella Kovac:
That’s my mother’s picture.
Rob Kosberg:
Beautiful.
Gabriella Kovac:
The book can be bought through Amazon as Georgina Holocaust survivors, or you can go onto my website, which is www.gabriellakovac.com or onto my Facebook page, I have a Facebook page, which is again, Gabriella Kovac.
Rob Kosberg:
Excellent. Gabriella, thank you for being on the Publish. Promote. Profit podcast. Congratulation on completing this legacy book and on all the success that that has come and will come. So, thank you.
Gabriella Kovac:
Thank you very much Rob, for seeing me and having a chat. To me it’s been a wonderful experience and I really appreciate it.
