Saving the Tremors of Past Lives: A Cross-Generational Holocaust Memoir (Holocaust: History and Literature)

Description

"This carefully crafted and deeply moving memoir is an account of the history of one of the very few Polish-Jewish families formed by the catastrophe of the Second World War and its subsequent history."

The Jewish community of the Polish border town of Brześc (Brisk in Yiddish), which had numbered almost 30,000 people, was wiped out during the Holocaust, with only about 10 of its members surviving. One of them was Masza Pinczuk, who escaped from the Brześc ghetto on the eve of its liquidation on Oct.15, 1942. Her future husband succeeded in escaping from the Warsaw ghetto.

They were the sole survivors of their respective families, and in this volume their daughter, Regina Grol, shares their story and meditates on the legacy of the Holocaust, exploring the lingering impact of the Holocaust on the following generations. Based on interviews and letters, and checked against historical facts, the book includes supporting documents and photographs. It also contains an account of the author's "internal flanerie" (to use Walter Benjamin's term), i.e., a retrospective and introspective look at her own life as a child of Holocaust survivors.