I’ve always been fascinated by the lost world of my grandparents’ childhoods: their homes, synagogues, schools, and streets that were the invisible backdrop to the stories I heard growing up. My grandparents were all Holocaust survivors, all born and raised in Poland, and all forced to leave home and family to fight for their survival. One grandfather was a tailor, and sewed concentration camp inmates’ uniforms to survive, my other grandfather an accountant who kept his Russian army general’s finances in order. One grandmother was hid underground by a Polish Catholic teenager, and the other always on the run. Growing up with them as grandparents, I learned their stories at a young age, saw the grainy black-and-white photos, and heard as they strained to remember details decades since. I would use my imagination to travel several thousand miles and years into past to fill in the rest.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that I put aside my imagination to learn the details of grandparents’ lives through oral and written testimony, historical research, and genealogical work. I began researching their towns and families online and quickly learned how to decipher documents in Polish and German, and read books in Yiddish and Hebrew. My older brother and I recorded interviews with my last living grandparent, Manya Birnberg, as well as Marisia Szul, the Catholic woman who hid my grandmother underground. I accumulated lists of names and businesses and addresses, and with everything in mind, tried to put together pictures of my grandparents’ European lives.
But I’ve come to the point in my research where lists, names, charts, and documents are not enough: I need to see everything for myself. I can’t piece together all the threads of information I’ve accumulated without seeing my grandparents' homes, synagogues, streets, and towns: that background and backdrop to their stories. This summer, I’ll be doing just that. With support from Princeton University's generous Martin Dale Summer Award, I’ll be traveling to Ukraine, Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Israel in a 6-and-a-half-week journey that will take me from my grandparents hometowns, to ghettos and concentration camps, to displaced persons camps, to Holocaust memorials. What will I find? It’s hard to say. What am I looking for? Part of me is looking for tangible memories of my grandparents’ childhoods and wartime experiences. But I’m also looking for what I can’t see. The smells of my family recipes in a distant home oven. Familiar voices in a foreign synagogue. My grandparents’ footprints on cobblestone.
