The past is our guide to the future. We owe our very existence to those who came before us.
Without memory there is no History. Each generation inherits history from the generation before, it tells us how as a society we behave and how we change. History is the systematic research of documents of our past. The Firsthand Accounts are living documents, told by real people about real life. History is used to validate Firsthand Accounts. Warsaw was called the Paris of the North. In vivid details the book describes the vibrant life, politics, Zionism, Bund, economic, social, religious and thriving creative life. After WWI, my mother’s community, siblings, extended family came to life. Jews had a long history in Poland, their future was forever severed, never to recover. The second part of the book details how those who ran east survived throughout Soviet Russia and Uzbekistan, a harsh exile that saved them from Hitler’s murderer’s grip.
Memory is Our Home is written for high school, college age readers in mind and beyond. A rich, living document, a thirty-year account that reveals a vibrant life of my mother’s family and the Eastern European, twentieth-century Jewish history, community and culture now completely erased. Rarely has a book been written that pencils a portrait of daily Jewish life during the interwar years in Poland, the Poland that was under Nazi’s murderers grip and the fate of Jews surviving throughout Russia and Uzbekistan during WWII. My mother survived against all ads, in Russia, in the midst of all the tragedy she even experienced love. What followed was a shocking repatriation to the “vast graveyard” and Jewish life under a new kind of oppression, communism, in postwar Poland. Based on my mother’s diary, interwoven are stories she told to me throughout my life, as well as my own recollections as my family made a new life in the shadows of the Holocaust aftermath in Communist Poland after the war and into the late 1960s. By retelling this story, I try to shed light on how history affected the next generation. The price my family paid when we said good-bye to the old world and the challenges we faced in America.
It is said that in every survivor’s family, one child is unconsciously chosen to be a “memorial candle,” to carry on the mourning and to dedicate his or her life to the memory of the Shoah. That child takes part in the parents’ emotional world, assumes the burden, and becomes the link between past and future. I realize now that my mother chose me to be that candle.
It was while I was a student of Professor Elie Wiesel at the City University of New York that I began to think my mother’s life story needs to be recorded. When I told Wiesel about my mother’s life he said, “Your mother must write her story. Future generations must know. You must help her to do it.”
Leaving Communism behind and starting a new life in America, it was at great risk to her health and sanity that she re-entered the world she suppressed for so long in order to write her story. She bravely faced the ghosts she left behind in Warsaw and Russia and brought them back to life. And in the words of Elie Wiesel “silence is never an option”. My mother wrote in her native language, Polish, the journals she called Beshert, Meant to Be, to honor her generation that had perished so that future generations have a way to remember her generation that flourished before WWII.
Once Poland was the home to the largest Jewish community in Europe. The Jewish culture in Poland flourished since the 14th century. Before WWII, over 3.3 million Jews lived there, making it the second largest Jewish community in the world. WWII destroyed this community completely, devastating their distinctive culture and society. The extent of the loss was so great, so destructive; we know it as the Holocaust, the Shoah.
Elie Wiesel was my professor at CCNY, he made me realize the importance of survivors’ stories, not just about surviving the Holocaust but about the life from before. Jews had a long history in Europe, their future was forever severed, never to recover.
Wiesel insisted my mother write down the accounts she shared with me, about growing up after WWI and how she survived WWII. He told us to commit everything to paper. His impact on me and my mother’s determination to give her generation a voice is how I became a memory keeper. In June 2016, before Wiesel’s passing, I presented “Crossing Paths with Elie Wiesel” on the stage in Santa Monica, CA as part of storytelling, sharing true stories about influential People in our lives. June 12, 2016. But it will be up to the next generations to make sure those firsthand accounts stay relevant in the future.
Crossing Paths with Elie Wiesel https://suzannaeibuszyc.substack.com/p/crossing-paths-with-elie-wiesel
The firsthand and the inter-generational experience are the key, without it there is no memory once that first generation is gone.
Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Blog 8/26/2015, Memory is Our Home: A Seed Planted in Childhood
My most vivid memory after the war in Poland is of my mother, always watching the door, always hopeful, never giving up that a loved one
would enter, back from the dead. Later, when I grasped the magnitude of the crimes against Jews in Europe, I questioned why my parents
thought it was essential to stay in “their homeland.” With time, I accepted how important it was for them to restore their roots where their
ancestors had lived for 1,000 years. My mother found courage and strength among the ashes of her family. She brought them back to life daily.
But 20 years after the war, Jews were targeted again with an anti-Semitic campaign, sponsored by the Communist government.
Between 1968 and 1969, Polish Jews were forced to disappear from Poland.
I graduated from CCNY with a BA, at the department of Jewish studies, where I first met Professor Elie Wiesel. I received an MA from UCLA, and was awarded a grant which allowed me to travel to Poland and Israel. Meeting professor and writer Elie Wiesel made me realize the importance of Holocaust survivors’ stories. I insisted my mother write down her incredible life story spanning some thirty years. It was always her desire that we work together on her book, but her wish did not materialize. It was after her death that I reconnected with Professor Wiesel; he more than anyone else gave me the courage to understand what my mother lived through. I was now ready to confront the ghosts of my childhood. And ultimately, I addressed how growing up with the trauma of Holocaust aftermath was transmitted from my parents to me.
http://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com/2015/01/memory-is-our-home-by-suzanna-eibuszyc.html
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Thanks for sharing 🙂