Elsa Gilbert was born in 1914 in Tbilisi, in the family of Carl Hermann Gilbert and Jacobina Bauer. In 1941, Elsa Gilbert’s parents were deported to Kazakh SSR, where they stayed until 1956. Elsa Gilbert graduated from the Faculty of Foreign Languages of Tbilisi State University in 1948. From 1948, she worked for 25 years at the Tbilisi Institute of Foreign Languages. Elsa Gilbert talks about her family. She had German heritage on both her mother’s and father’s sides and lived in Georgia in the German colony of Katerinburg. The interview describes how her mother and father were exiled to Kazakhstan, and Elsa herself survived only because her husband was Georgian.
Collection contains documents from personal archive of Elsa Gilbert and her Oral history.