Today Ilana Diamond Rovner is a United States Court of Appeals Judge for the Seventh Circuit, and resides here in Chicago. But she almost didn’t make it to this country.  Born Jewish in Riga, Latvia in 1938, her parents decided they must leave Latvia as Hitler invaded Poland, her father left first, and then she and her mother followed.

She was recorded in the StoryCorps MobileBooth when it visited Chicago in 2005.