“It was beshert”, she wrote. “Meant to be.” How else could she explain why she had lived, while millions had perished?
My mother’s story is a heroic tale of a young woman who survived, against all odds, as a child and teenager in Warsaw from 1917 till 1939 and as a young woman in Soviet Russia and Uzbekistan from 1939 till 1946. Her manuscript pays tribute to Jewish life in Warsaw in the interwar period, to the thousand year long Jewish history in Poland and to Polish Jews who sought refuge on Soviet soil at the outbreak of WWII.
Her decision to flee Warsaw after the Nazi occupation haunted her all her life. A young woman of 21, she left behind starving brothers and sisters and their five young children, thinking she would return in a few weeks. Instead, to survive, she kept going east, traveling into the unknown on trains packed with other Jewish and Polish refugees. Soon she found herself in Stalinist Russia, far from Poland and family, full of remorse, but it was a decision that saved her life.
The second part of the book is a tale of survival in Soviet occupied territories, Soviet Russia and Uzbekistan until March 1946. Soviet Russia and Soviet-occupied Central Asia proved to be for Polish Jews the single best chance for surviving and escaping the catastrophe that engulfed Poland’s Jews during the Second World War.
Roma Tałasiewicz-Eibuszyc was born in Warsaw in 1917, the youngest of six, acutely aware of the world around her. As a teenager she became active in politics, embracing the thriving Socialist Jewish movement, Bund. The first twenty years covered in detail, her childhood and young adulthood in Warsaw. Years of exquisite tenderness and love in her family are contrasted with poverty, abandonment, desperation and tragedy that would befall her promising world.
She escaped Warsaw in order to save herself only to endure the brutality of Stalinist’s regime. Surviving in the remote corners of Uzbekistan took extraordinary courage, lived with the hope of returning to the family she had abandoned in Warsaw, this is what kept her alive.
In 1946, almost a year after the war ended, Roma and the other survivors were allowed to leave Russia, forced to settle in southwestern Poland. Still hoping to be reunited with her lost siblings, she made her way to Warsaw only to witness the city’s devastation, and the annihilation of her family.
In 1968 she was finally bound for America, to be reunited with her only surviving sibling. I was fourteen at the time, witnessing my mother learning English at night, working in a factory all day, and fulfilling her hope that her daughters would become educated young women. Her traumatic days were gone, but her feelings of loss and devastation lived on inside of her until Beshert.
With heartfelt thanks, Suzanna Eibuszyc
Author’s story
I want to thank all my passionate supporters, for all of your help throughout this life-altering process, which has brought me closer with my mother and her incredible journey through life.
My book is a rich, living document, a thirty-year account that reveals in vivid details Jewish life in Poland that was decimated by the events of WWII. The book pays tribute to the chapter in our history that is now almost forgotten. I make a point that this very personal story is told in the background of twentieth-century history so that Memory is Our Home can be used as an educational tool, especially at the high school level.
This book is based on my mother’s Roma Tałasiewicz-Eibuszyc diary, her writings about Warsaw Poland during the interwar period and the six years during World War WII surviving throughout Soviet territories. Interwoven with her writings are stories she related 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 1960’s.
Professor Wiesel was instrumental in my translating and researching my mother’s journals, but my awakening to the dark period in the chapter of the Jewish history happened earlier, 1971-1974, at CCNY when our paths crossed while I was taking his classes at the department of Jewish studies. It was in his classes that the things that bewildered me as a child growing up in communist Poland in the shadows of the Holocaust aftermath started to make sense. It was then that I asked my mother to start writing her journals. My mother hesitated at first. What I did not understand at the time was that in order for her to write she had to recall painful memories buried deep inside her, but she knew her generation had an obligation to bear witness.
On the day of her death in 2006, I found the box containing the pages of my mother’s diary, covering thirty years of her life. In a thin, shaky handwriting she recalled heart-searing memories that began with being born a Jew in Warsaw in 1917 and ended with WWII, her return to Poland after surviving six years throughout remote corners of Soviet Russia. I proceeded to translate her story from Polish to English, quickly realizing how important it was that the stories of her life, as well as the legacy of Jewish life in Poland be remembered by generations to come.
Suzanna Eibuszyc. Memory is Our Home; the Story of Roma Tałasiewicz-Eibuszyc is based on my mother’s journal and on my memories growing up in Communist Poland. I translated and researched her diary starting in 2006. I was born in Poland, lived in NYC, Calabasas, California, and now in South Carolina.
On the day my mother died, I opened the box containing the memoir which she had brought six years before from NY to Los Angeles. As I started to read her pages, my own childhood in Poland came to life. My mother’s pages took me back in time, to the stories she shared with me about herself when I was a child.
Professor Elie Wiesel encouraged me to start translating the memoir and not be afraid of the journey ahead. We need to rescue stories like this from obscurity and share them with future generations. To quote Elie Wiesel “We must bear witness. Silence is not an option.”
I thank my family, friends, and colleagues and at the advice of a literary agent for inspiring me to work on the book. They all believe this is an important story, both historically and on a human level. I want to bring my mother’s book out of obscurity so that future generations have a way to remember my mother’s vanished world, and to pay tribute to a thousand yearlong Jewish legacy in Eastern Europe.
This memoir will become an important source in the historical investigations of the social history of Eastern European Jewish women and Jewish families between the years of 1918 and 1968.
Thanks for sharing 🙂