A few photos of my amazing (and super fashionable???) grandmother, who passed peacefully in the summer of 2023.

In the meantime, I’ll leave it to those who have more to say.

explain why so much more of that history was lost, indeed, stolen from us. It should go without saying that we should never forget and make sure *never again.*

There’s so much more to say. I’ve recorded a few dozen interviews with my grandma that I hope to turn into a book someday…

we can’t even imagine and even people who were children at the time, bear the physical and mental scars decades later.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. I just wanted to get some thoughts down on #HolocaustRemembranceDay to share a small aspect of my family’s history and…

my great uncle or learn about my grandma’s aunts and uncles and cousins because she didn’t get to know them. It’s a tragic reality, that only scratches at the horror of what happened in the Holocaust.

It’s clear that my grandma and so many others experienced unspeakable horrors…

so she did not yet have a large collection of memories of them. And as those humans were taken from their families and taken from the earth in such a violent and destructive manner, it’s made worse by the fact that photo albums, diaries, and memories went with them. I never got the chance to meet…

how much of that era could she really have known or remembered?

A childhood stolen, a life forever changed by the things she saw, heard, smelled, had to do. She may not have known the family that was taken from her all that well. She was a child when the Nazis invaded…

I got more serious about trying to learn about her childhood and time throughout the Holocaust, but it was clear she didn’t like to talk about it. She fondly recalls her childhood before and the moment she met my grandfather, soon after they both returned in Poland.

But even if she wanted to…

that she wasn’t there for long before the end of the war.

Toward the end of the war, she and a number of others were able to escape.

She doesn’t talk about this time without being asked. When I studied history in college and began writing for my college paper…

At some point, they were transferred to the Krakow concentration camp. It was a labor camp as well as a death camp, like Auschwitz, where cousins and aunts and uncles she only met a few times were sent and murdered. She was lucky, in a sense, in that she wasn’t murdered there and…

was separated from her family.

Lucky ones, like her father and brother, were shot in the street. My grandma was a child at the time. She watched them get killed. She didn’t go to Auschwitz, she and her mother were forced to work in the home a Nazi officer took over in her town of Krakow, Poland…

That’s no fun. I had my morning coffee and then another cup about a half hour ago. Hoping that’s enough

Because loud or tired? Or both?

I can dig that