I have always known that my own mother’s “How I escaped the Holocaust” story was atypical but as I read more survivors’ memoirs, I discover that nobody else’s story is typical, either.
Perhaps even more remarkable than the books themselves is the fact that such books continue to emerge, even after 60 years. As the authors of such memoirs increasingly are survivors’ children trying to rediscover the truth by mining historical documents and parents’ failing memories, these stories become more complex and enigmatic.
Two haunting memoirs of Holocaust survival appearing within the past year illustrate the wide disparity within this genre.
“Throw Your Feet Over Your Shoulders: Beyond the Kindertransport by Frieda Korobkin” (Devora Publishing, hardcover, $21.95) and “The Pages in Between: A Holocaust Legacy of Two Families, One Home” by Erin Einhorn (Simon and Schuster, paperback, $16) both explore the odysseys of fair, blue-eyed little Jewish girls from central Europe who survived because their parents sent them to live with gentile families, and both detail their extended family histories.
Korobkin’s might be the most heart-warming and uplifting Holocaust memoir I’ve ever read. Six-year-old Friedl Stolzberg, like my own mother, was from Vienna, but she grew up in a large Orthodox family.
Sent off to London with her elder siblings and a train full of other Jewish children, through the organization of saintly Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, she maintained some connection to her loved ones and her past life.
The first of four families with whom Frieda stayed in England is Jewish, if less observant than her own. Mrs. Simmons takes Frieda to the cinema on Saturday afternoon and strikes her in a rage for falling asleep during the film.
Then with the beginning of war, Frieda is evacuated to the countryside, where she lives with a succession of three non-Jewish families, two of whom treat her kindly.
All the while she manages to correspond with her family, including her older brother Ephraim, who is living in a Jewish boys’ hostel in Wales. He arranges for her to join him at the hostel. After that closes, she is sent to Rabbi Schonfeld’s Jewish secondary school in Shefford, where she stays happily through the end of the war, making life-long friends.
After a few years in Israel, she eventually settles in the U.S. and marries an American.
This memoir, complete with family photographs and heartfelt original poetry, helps readers relate to World War II on an immediate personal level. Despite all the tragedy of the war, the author seems to have emerged with her mental health and faith in God intact.
Einhorn’s book, which was featured on the public radio program “This American Life,” is more disturbing. While exploring larger issues of Polish Jewish history and inter-group relations, Einhorn investigates her own family’s mysteries.
Her grandfather hands over the author’s mother Irena Frydrych as a toddler to a Polish woman, Honorata Skowronski, along with a promise of all his real property.
Unlike Frieda Stolzberg, Irena grows up with little interest in discussing her experiences. From what she is able to learn, Einhorn discovers major discrepancies between family legend and the truth.
After some wavering, she decides to go to Poland for an extended stay, to look for the people who saved her mother’s life, and to unravel the mystery surrounding her family’s fate.
She finds Honorata’s son, but after several years, she still has more questions than answers, plus plenty of expensive legal headaches. A story of poor choices and betrayed trusts unfolds, and several characters in both families appear in a less than favorable light, including the author herself.
Anyone looking for a story with a satisfying resolution will be disappointed in this book. Readers curious about the level of anti-Semitism in modern Poland or the impact of post traumatic stress disorder on the second generation will find this book a good starting point.
Einhorn acknowledges that there’s more to Polish Jewish history than the years 1939-1945, and she seems ambivalent about the blooming “genocide tourism” industry around Auschwitz and the Jewish-themed nightclubs in nearby Krakow, where young people dance the Lambada to “Hava Nagilah.”
Before we see a decline in the number of new Holocaust memoirs, we might soon expect a last flurry of them, as authors race urgently to capture their parents’ and grandparents’ remaining memories.
A Milwaukee-based writer, Susan Ellman is the former librarian at Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun. She is working on a historical novel.
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