Inspiring woman

91 yr old IIlona Royce Smithkin

Ilona Royce Smithkin for Stylelikeu.com from StyleLikeU on Vimeo.

"I get the essence of a person. If you have three wrinkles or four, it doesn't really matter. But if your mouth expresses something, strength or sadness or weakness, there's something to say about it."

She was born in Poland and raised as a young child in Nazi Germany, during which she developed a nervous shake – she feared the doorbell would ring and someone would come in and kill her family for no reason – that has lasted a lifetime. When her family came to the US in ’38, Ilona was a teenager and recalls not knowing how to laugh. “I came here and looked at people, and they laughed at lunchtime and I said ‘How can they laugh? What is there to laugh about?’ It was that bad. It’s hard to believe now that I am so up, but that is really true.”  stylelikeu.com