Mona Golabek

Mona Golabek was born in Los Angeles, California, a daughter of Lisa Jura, a concert pianist, and her husband, French resistance fighter Michel Golabek. Lisa Jura was born in Austria, and was one of 10,000 Jewish children brought to England just before the start of World War II as part of the Kindertransport, a mission to rescue children threatened by the Nazis. Her maternal grandparents died at Auschwitz. Michel Golabek received the Croix de Guerre for his heroism in the French Resistance during WW II.

Mona was taught piano largely by her mother, who had in turn learned to play from her own mother Malka Jura, and she also studied with Leon Fleisher, Reginald Stewart, and Joanna Graudan. In 1980, Mona won an Avery Fisher Career Grant.

She has appeared in concert with major orchestras and conductors around the world and in recitals at the Hollywood Bowl, the Kennedy Center, and the Royal Festival Hall. She was the subject of the PBS documentaries More Than the Music, winner of the Grand Prize in the 1985 WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival.

In 1998, she began hosting her own classical music radio program, "The Romantic Hours." In 2003, with Lee Cohen, she published The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport: A Memoir of Music, Love, and Survival, and founded the Hold on To Your Music nonprofit organization, dedicated to sharing her mother's story with others. In 2012, she was featured in a one-woman show based on the book, The Pianist of Willesden Lane, which was produced at the Geffen Playhouse and had successful theatrical runs in Chicago, Berkeley and New York.