Shadows of the Holocaust

After I gave a presentation about my mother’s Holocaust history at a senior residence in Chicago a few years ago, a man in his late 80s came up to me and whispered, “I want to tell you something.” He grabbed my elbow and ushered me into a private corner of the room. “I’ve never told anyone this before.” Tears streaked his face, and he bit his lip as he worked ...

On my first trip to my mother’s town, Stockstadt am Rhein, I wondered if there would be any physical evidence of her past. “What can remain of a family destroyed fifty-two years earlier?” I wrote in my memoir, Motherland. I learned then that the past has peculiar ways of inserting itself into the present. When we first arrived in Germany, my mother turned to me and said, “We can’t leave ...

  A student creates a paper stumbling stone to remember a Holocaust victim and teacher actually knew the man she memorialized!

Most homes in Germany are handed down from one generation to the next. My mother’s family, the Westerfelds, had built their house in Stockstadt am Rhein in 1721, and they lived in it for 200 years. In 1939, when my grandparents were desperate for money, one of the town’s prominent Nazis pressured the family into selling the Westerfeld home for next to nothing. Eventually, the home was handed down to ...

A Wisconsin women’s prison selected my memoir, MOTHERLAND, for its book club, and then invited me to speak to readers. The women related to my mother’s story in a way I never could have predicted. My grandparents sent my 12-year-old mother as an unaccompanied minor from Nazi Germany to America to save her life in 1938. My grandparents never explained to my mother why they felt they had to take ...

On one of our visits to the small German town my mother fled as an unaccompanied minor in 1938, a woman my mother hardly remembered asked that we visit her in her nursing home. My mother wasn’t interested, but the woman insisted, saying she had something she absolutely had to give to my mother. Finally, we stopped by her home, and she presented Mom with this box. “Before your mother ...

The World Jewish Congress marked the 84th anniversary of the Kindertransport with this post: "After the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, Jewish groups organized a secret rescue operation to get Jewish children of out of Nazi-occupied Europe. Because of immigration laws, their parents were unable to join them. "The first group of children arrived in the UK in December 1938. It is estimated that up to 10,000 children were saved ...

Every year for Totensonntag, a German friend takes her son to the stolpersteine that memorialize my family in Stockstadt am Rhein -- my mother's town. Totensonntag is a Protestant religious holiday in Germany and Switzerland that commemorates those who have departed. My friend sent me this photo this morning of the candle she placed at my family's stumbling stones. Recently, I read this fascinating article, "Monuments to the Unthinkable" by ...

Five years ago today, my mother's best friend passed away. The two met on the ship in 1938 as they fled Nazi Germany to America. In 2011, eighth-graders reunited the two friends after a 72-year separation. The first time Gerda and Edith "talked," they said hello and then sobbed together. No words were necessary. Each felt the other was the only person who understood their deep uprooting and unbearable losses. ...

Here, my mother's sister, Betty, (4th from left) is flanked by her German friends just before she fled Nazi Germany for America in 1937. In her writings, Betty described how she got her passport. “I was a wide-eyed fourteen-year-old, very much a country bumpkin. Everything was new and interesting. Life lay ahead of me and, if it were not for Hitler, things would have been fine. “But I knew I ...