When I told Prof. Wiesel about my mother, he said, “Your mother must write her story. Future generations must know.”
It was a great risk to her sanity and health to re enter her unbearable past, but for the sake of the truth my mother wrote. She bravely brought her family and her Jewish life from after WWI back to life. And on the day, she died and for the next six years I entered my mother’s world, and I confronted the ghosts of my childhood. Wiesel’s advice to me, “do not be afraid of the journey ahead.”
Prof. Wiesel was the catalyst, my mother conveyed strength and perseverance, and left me with a living document, giving a voice to those whose voices were silenced.
Memory is Our Home is a rich, living document, a thirty-year account that reveals the life of a young woman with hopes and dreams for a better world who lived to bear witness to unspeakable suffering and all that she saw, felt, and thought. It is a story of sacrifice, determination, loyalty, and love. She pays tribute to our history and legacy, the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe that was forever decimated by Nazism, Hitler and their enthusiastic supporters.
Photographs are used as a way to remember and connect. But Not One Photograph existed that connected my mother to her family. She mourned and brought them back to life daily. She painted pictures of her loved ones, with words.
It was during my time, at City College of NY, in Prof. Elie Wiesel’s classes, that I connected the dots of how the Holocaust affected my mother and me. I see him clearly, slender and frail but determined, full of great urgency. The horrors he lived through were visible on his face. He was 15 when he and his family were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau from Romania. He was liberated at Buchenwald.
Wiesel’s horrors triggered in me my childhood memories of growing up with the ghosts of my mother’s murdered family. Freud called it “shadow memories,” acquired traumas. Trying to atone what can neither be undone nor ever understood, much less resolved. My childhood in Poland now made sense. I understood that in losing her entire family my mother could not escape her past. By engraving her stories into my memory, she pledged me as the “memorial candle”, the link between the past and the future, I was their voice.
I had no way of knowing, but the seed for writing “Memory is Our Home” was planted in my childhood. Looking back in time, I know now that my entire life was a preparation, to be “a memorial candle”. I assumed the burden of my parents’ emotional world and I became the link between the past and the future. This history is embedded deep in my memory, my soul, it is part of my DNA.
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Thanks for sharing 🙂