I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know my grandma was a Holocaust survivor. This is a stark contrast from my mom, a second-generation survivor, who had never even heard the word “Holocaust” until age thirteen when she discovered the topic at the public library.
For me, a Pikesville native who attended Krieger Schechter Day School, my Jewish identity was nurtured in a safe space where I was able to learn and grow freely from a young age. While I always knew I was the grandchild of survivors, the weight of this fact didn’t really register with me until much later in life.
Growing up, visiting my grandma (two-and-a-half hours away) was the best. We had the same routine each time we went. The highlights included an enormous picnic lunch at Greenwood Furnace State Park and meandering through my grandma’s pristine house to look at all her framed family pictures.
It wasn’t until my late twenties that I started to piece together why my grandma did some of the things she did. She always had so much food for us. I assumed it was because that was just what grandmas did, not because she been starved during the Holocaust, weighing only 60 pounds when she was liberated from Ravensbruck concentration camp at 23 years old.
She always kept her house completely clear of any dust, dirt or clutter. I figured it was because she was just a neat person, not because she had spent several years of her life living in filth, being eaten alive by lice causing multiple recurrences of typhus fever. She kept dozens of framed family photos on all surfaces of the house. I didn’t realize then that during the War, her extended family was whittled down from over 70 people to just four, or that their homes were simply gone one day when she and her fellow Czestechowa Jews were rounded up in the center of town. Now, at 32 years old and a mom of two, my heart aches each time I think about my grandma preparing those delicious picnics for us, part of her subconsciously panicking that her food could be taken away at any time. Or when I think about how hard she must have worked to keep her house so clean, fearful of how dirt or germs could literally kill you. And then my heart swells when I imagine how proud it must have made her to see those family pictures placed neatly all around her home, proving that not only did the Nazis not succeed, but also that her two children and seven grandchildren meant that there were now nine more Jews in the world.
