Chapter 7 Transcript : A strange way of feeling alive
Note: We Share The Same Sky is produced to be heard and not read. We encourage you to listen to the audio which includes emotion, accents, laughter, music, pauses, and emphasis that can not be transcribed to this page.
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USC SHOAH FOUNDATION INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your father.
HANA DUBOVA: He used to love to read to us, and we used to snuggle into bed with him at night and he would read, and I still today can hear him how he -- he probably read it a hundred times but he always laughed. I think that I did worship him and adored him. I thought he was the best looking man in my universe.
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RACHAEL CERROTTI: Back when war was still on the horizon, when Hana had escaped to Denmark, Hana’s father -- Josef -- wrote to distant family in Cincinnati. He pleaded for their help. If his whole family couldn’t get out of Europe, how about just Hana.
Josef then wrote to Hana in Denmark. He told her that she should go to the American Embassy in Copenhagen to see if the affidavit that he hopelessly wished for, came through. But she refused.
HANA DUBOVA: “I still have all the letters from my parents, after all these years. And I promise myself I am going to translate them from English. I start and then I stop. Then a year later I start and I stop. Just don't know. I really haven't finished it.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: On August 6, 1940, a 15-year-old Hana writes in her diary, quote “I sent both letters back and also a letter saying that I didn’t give a damn about the affidavit and that I had to go to Palestine. Daddy kept bombarding me with letters. He hit the roof, reproaching me for not loving my own parents, leaving them high and dry and how much they had sacrificed for me and me nothing for them and that I was an ungrateful daughter and how they should disown me. From their point of view they’re completely right. But I am young and I want to create something. I want to face life for what it is, to build and help, even with hard work. I don’t want to go to Cincinnati to stay with my rich great-great aunt to study and live a cushy life. No, that’s not my ideal.”
When Hana returned to Denmark after the war ended, she found herself a job helping refugees. Thousands of Danes were coming home from Sweden (as well as the Danish Jews who had been deported to Concentration Camps.
HANA DUBOVA: The people who were returning to Denmark, they had to be processed so to speak.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: That was Hana’s job. To help them get their property back.
HANA DUBOVA: They came back to the same surrounding as they left. The people who took care of the Danish property, never appropriated their property like they did in other countries.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: The Danes protected the belongings of neighbors who had to flee during the war. They watered their plants and treated each home as if the owners were guaranteed to return. Once peace had been declared, they welcomed the Jewish people home with parades and celebrations. It was nothing like what Hana would experience a year later when she returned to Prague.
In 1946, when she was 20-years-old, she decided it was time to go back and see what remained of her family’s home.
HANA DUBOVA: There were really two plans. One was to become something. Somebody. And the two was to go back and see whose left. And maybe show that I became somebody.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Only a few of Hana’s relatives returned from the camps. Her father’s sister came home. She was spared from the extermination camps because of her interfaith marriage. Her husband, who wasn’t Jewish but was deported for being married to her also returned. But soon after, he died from Typhus which he had contracted at the concentration camp.
On her mother’s side, her uncle returned home. He survived the war by walking through Czechoslovakia, Poland and into the Soviet Union where he enlisted in the Soviet Army. When he came back to Prague, he was a communist and a military man. He completely abandoned his Judaism, giving up every remnant of his culture in order to protect his future.
Hana returned to a city that looked familiar, but felt foreign.
HANA DUBOVA: I had such a creepy feeling and I really really didn’t want to stay. But, I had nobody in Denmark. I had nobody in Sweden.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: So Hana stayed in Prague for about a year.
HANA DUBOVA: I had this stateless passport. And I enrolled in the university in Prague and studied linguistics. Wanted to study Danish and Swedish which was the easiest thing for me to do.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Prague was spared from being bombed during the war. Hitler had wanted to turn the city into a museum. He wanted Prague to exhibit the extinct race -- to show that he’d eliminated the Jewish people. He thought that Prague would be the evidence of what he destroyed. Or in his eyes, what he built.
Perhaps he succeeded in a way. The Jewish Quarter in Prague remains one of the main tourist attractions in the Czech Republic. The synagogues stand. The gravestones are in tact. The names of the victims are written all over the walls. But the people -- they’re gone.
And Hana knew that she was the last of her family.
HANA DUBOVA: Everybody freezes in your mind. You can not visualize how they would look older. You will see them 10 years from now the way they were 10 years before. But you know, you walk on the streets and you don’t know maybe you will meet your brother. You think maybe, oh, but even if I walked on the streets, I wouldn’t even recognize him. I wouldn’t know how he looked like. Like a little kid.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Her brother would have been 17. Her mother would have been 41. Her father would have been 48. Only Hana was left.
HANA DUBOVA: Many many years later, the psychologists put a label on everything. And the label was the guilt of the survivor. And I had that guilt of the survivor even though I didn’t have a label on that, I did not know that’s what it was. I still today, many many 50 years later, I question myself. There must have been a purpose. And then I say, maybe life is just a lottery. Maybe it’s random. Maybe it’s a random thing. And I believe that more and more the older I get because there are righteous people who die and their are criminals who keep on living. And, I was, felt very guilty. And when I found out what happened to my parents, I did slash my wrists, but not deep enough to something happened because I said to myself why, why am I alive? I don’t deserve it.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: My grandmother once wrote that her parents gave her two big gifts in life. The first was a camera. And the second was sending her away.
I’m Rachael Cerrotti. We Share The Same Sky.
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RACHAEL CERROTTI: Hana and all of the other teens she fled Czechoslovakia with in 1939 survived the war. But for most of them, their entire families were murdered by the Nazis. After the war, some of them went back to Czechoslovakia. Some stayed in Sweden. Others built lives for themselves in Denmark. Or went to Israel after it was established. Others immigrated to places like Canada or England or the United States. And those decisions have shaped history and Jewish identity for each of their descendants.
Dasa, Hana’s first boyfriend -- the one who kissed her under the table on her 14th birthday and the boy she requested to be close to in Denmark -- he was also the only survivor in his family. After spending some time in Israel, he decided to settle in Denmark, the place he’d found refuge during the war. He and Hana always stayed in touch. Until the day he died. And after that, he stayed in her stories. Even after two husbands, three children and seven grandchildren, my grandmother never stopped caring about him.
EVA BERGMANN: Your grandma, she umm, may still have felt like my dad was, umm, probably one of the men that she liked the most in her whole life.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: That’s Eva Bergmann. Dasa’s daughter. You heard from her in episode two. I’ve spent a lot of time with different children and grandchildren of the group of teenagers that my grandmother escaped with from Czechoslovakia. And each branch of each family tree has carried the story differently.
MICHAEL BERGMANN: When we were kids, we wanted our parents to talk about the war. It was exciting as a child.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Michael is Eva’s brother -- another of Dasa’s four children.
MICHAEL BERGMANN: But they couldn’t. They gave a very short and polished version and a few times I saw my father crying in the corner of the garden. And he wasn’t the kind of person who you could go to and pat the shoulders or something or put your arm around him.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: This was a profound moment for Michael. His father didn’t often show his grief.
EVA BERGMANN: I remember my dad. Umm, I think he was trying to celebrate my grandfather’s 100th birthday. He would start speaking something and then he would choke. You could see how he struggled and it hurt all over my body. It was so painful to see how what pain he was in. When you have such pain, you create like a, there is an emptiness between you and the other people because you can’t completely share yourself because you don’t wanna share that, you know. You don’t wanna pass it onto your children. If you tell everything, it would also damage your children. It’s a fine balance.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: My mom has said something similar about my grandmother.
JANET CERROTTI: My mother's story had a profound effect on who I am. I resonated with her probably sometimes too much. I could be so wrong. I don't know. But sometimes I, I think that she hardened herself and I felt those feelings for her. Some of her loss that she, it would be too painful for her to go there? I internalized some of them.
I integrated them into myself.
MICHAEL BERGMANN: You have said many times before that we were crying his tears. Because he couldn’t express it. It was too hard.
EVA BERGMANN: Yeah, I have been processing, in some way, unconsciously my dad’s grief.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: During this conversation with Michael and Eva, I sat with Ruben, Michael’s son, one of Dasa’s grandchildren. Ruben and I are the third generation. We listened to memories about Dasa and Hana’s friendship. And then Ruben asked me.
RUBEN BERGMANN Do you feel that your mom has absorbed the trauma so that it hasn’t been passed on to you?
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Umm, I think she’s absorbed the trauma. You know, I’ve also spent 10 years living inside of my grandmother’s story so I sometimes can not differentiate if I am feeling my own feelings or Hana’s feelings which has been a really weird way to narrate my own life, especially with the death of my husband. Becuase to be so inside of a Holocaust survivor’s story when dealing with my own loss has provided both, like a extreme source of strength as well as just kind of an infuriating feeling where you’re just like, I just can’t take any more of this. And I can’t really pinpoint which day is what. It just kind of all swirls together. And sometimes it they both happen at the same time. Yeah, what about you?
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RACHAEL CERROTTI: When my grandmother knew she was dying, she became obsessed with the question of: why did I survive? She was desperate to know what she left for the world. She repeated it over and over again when I visited: “Why was it I who got this long life? Why was it I who kept living? I didn’t write any book, I didn’t cure any disease, why is it that I am the one who is still here?”
HANA DUBOVA: When I became 34. And when I became 41, I said so were my parents when I left them that old. Then my daughter becomes 34 and then my daughter becomes 41. And my granddaughter is now little older than I was when I left. And, it’s just mind boggling to see that. Yeah. Yeah.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Hana’s Journal, 1985 -- age 60 : “I often wonder if one grieves for the departed person, who’ll never again experience anything, who’ll not see sunrise or sunset, who will not enjoy or have sorrow, who will not have pleasures and disappointment, who will not hear the birds sing or a symphony, who will not enjoy beautiful scenery or paintings in a museum, who will not read a book, discuss a movie, enjoy a play, who will not argue, listen, cook, wash clothes, or dishes, serve coffee, chat, enjoy company or solitude. Do we grieve for those who can’t do these worldly actions belonging to life or do we grieve for ourselves that we are left alone, that they left us and we have to fare on our own? Or is it possible that we grieve for both. I almost suspect we grieve for ourselves, us living.”
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RACHAEL CERROTTI: Back in the winter of 2015, three months after Sergio I were married, we received a phone call from his mother. She told us that Sergio’s father, Aleksander, had had a stroke while he was skiing. He was in a coma. And no one knew if he would ever wake up.
As Sergio translated fragments of their conversation to me, his back slid down the wall until he reached the floor. His body curled into a ball. His face hidden in his elbows.
We both knew that he wasn’t allowed to leave the country. We were still early in his immigration process and he was locked in a jail cell of legal jargon. If he left the United States before having his paperwork approved, our case could have been thrown out and he wouldn’t be let back into the country.
We rushed to the immigration office in downtown Boston and sat in a quiet, sterile room that had multiple tv’s airing the news on mute. I held his hand while he stared at his phone, desperate for a text from his mother saying everything was okay.
We put in a request to rush his travel permit. Then we waited. First for one week. And then another. His father still was not awake. Every day we questioned whether he was doing the right thing by staying in America with me.
A month passed. We kept waiting. Then a couple more weeks. And then his father woke up and Sergio traveled back to Poland.
ALEKSANDER SCHELLER : I‘m Aleksander. I am father of Sergiusz Scheller and father-in-law, Rachael Cerrotti.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: This is Aleksander. My father-in-law. Sergio’s father. You’ll notice that he pronounces Sergio’s name differently -- it’s Sergiusz in Polish. And this is his mother.
DANUTA SCHELLER: I am Danuta.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: I recorded this interview in 2019, almost three years after Sergiusz died.
DANUTA SCHELLER: I am mother of Sergiusz Scheller and mother-in-law of [polish & crying]. I am Danuta. I am mother of Sergiusz Scheller and mother-in law of Rachael Cerrotti.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Back in March of 2016, when Sergio went home to be with his family, he had only a week to visit. We were having a hard time navigating a marriage when he felt so far from his family. For that week he went home, he lay on the white couch in their living room. Danuta sat in the chair across from him, as they had always done. Every day, they were visiting with Aleksander in the hospital. And each day, Sergio questioned where was home. If he should return to me in Boston or stay with his parents in Poland.
DANUTA SCHELLER: It was very sad for everybody because this evening, we have to take Aleksander to hospital and next morning, Sergiusz has to go back to Boston. And umm, we were sad. We were crying. And, Sergiusz said in one moment, okay, I just leave everything and staying with you a little longer. And I said, no you can’t because you have wife in Boston. You have your life is in Boston. And we say, the same what what I think still now. Sergiusz, we share the same sky. We look at the same stars. So, we are close. To each other.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: I’ve become really close with Sergio’s parents since he passed away. Witnessing them grieve has made me think about Hana’s parents more than I ever had before. I often let my mind wander to that last scene from Prague, where Hana waved goodbye to her parents from the train. I used to imagine myself in Hana’s shoes. But now, especially when I spend time with Sergio’s parents, I find myself with them, waving on that platform.
When Hana finally returned to Prague in 1946, she didn’t stay long. She went back to Denmark, where her visa was issued and then back to Sweden where some friends found her a job. She was happy there. She liked her work and felt secure with the community of Czech expats also living in Stockholm. She skied in the winters and hiked in the summers. She loved talking about literature and attending the opera. But she understood that the life she was building was temporary. She knew that someday soon, she would move to America.
In 1948, the United States passed The Displaced Persons Act. It offered permanent residency in America to 200,000 displaced Europeans. A friend helped Hana follow up with the paperwork for the visa that her father had applied for at the beginning of the war.
HANA DUBOVA: He asked me whether we ever applied to go to the United States and I told him the story so he did all the research for me.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: She was approved to move to the U.S. as part of a quota set for people displaced from Czechoslovkia.
HANA DUBOVA: By the time the affidavit came, I didn’t want to go. I had already established myself in Sweden. I had a job, I had a room, I had some friends. And, I didn’t want to go.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: My grandmother told me that she didn’t want to start all over again. She didn’t want to learn another language. It would be her sixth. And, she didn’t want to start over not knowing a soul. She was tired. Exhausted of change. But, she thought that maybe she could become a stewardess or a translator. And if America didn’t work out, she knew that her Swedish visa gave her six months to return.
So, on November 16, 1950, Hana stood side by side with other hopeful emigrants as she boarded a great ship named the Queen Elizabeth. As if as simple as turning a page in one of her frayed photo albums, my grandmother went from being a 14-year-old refugee fleeing her childhood to being a 25-year-old woman leaving everything behind for something. She watched Europe drift away, waving it goodbye with more intention and nostalgia than she had to any home before.
She carried far more trauma than belongings, but willed herself optimistic about the future.
HANA DUBOVA: And I came to the United States on that paper which was issued by my grandmother’s step sister to my parents.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: This was the same woman her father had been trying to contact in the early years of the war. She lived in Cincinnati. Hana traveled there from New York, by train. She watched the light bounce off unfamiliar architecture and fold into the skies covered by mountains. She wondered when they’d reach Ohio. No one had told her what time her stop would be, or how long the trip was.
HANA DUBOVA: And I had no idea that the country was so big and every time the train stopped at the station, I jumped up. And I thought am I in Cincinnati, I couldn’t believe it, 5 hours, 6 hours, 7 hours, 8 hours on the train. So I was afraid to miss it.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Hana arrived at Union Station in Cincinnati in November of 1950. Just after Thanksgiving. In the decades before her arrival, hundreds of European families had moved to Cincinnati to start a new life in America. Her distant family was one of them. They’d come at the turn of the century.
HANA DUBOVA: The lady who was the step-sister, their name was Weil, W-E-I-L. They were bakers. They had a bakery. And, they met me at the train station and took me to the house. They told me, which I did not know, that my father sent them money before the war. Some money. So there was $200 for me which they kept all these years. So I had $200 to work with.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Hana arrived to a big suburban house with a lawn in front. A few concrete steps led from the sidewalk to the porch.
Details of the Holocaust had begun to spread, and the rest of the world was on the brink of understanding what had happened during this incomprehensible black page in history. Villages were shattered. Entire communities were murdered. Borders shifted. Democracies crumbled. Roots were burned.
Every European faced a different reality. Each carried a different loss. And, survivors, like Hana, one of the millions displaced, were arriving on doorsteps around the world, starting anew.
Aside from her family, Hana had one other connection in Cincinnati -- a person that would change her entire experience with becoming an American. Back in Stockholm, while she’d been waiting for the visa to come, she’d met a man named Mosley. He was an American exchange student from Kentucky. He was also the first black man Hana ever met. They became fast friends in Sweden. He promised to teach her English and in exchange she taught him Swedish. Sometimes they rode on his motorcycle together. Her on the back with her arms around his waist.
HANA DUBOVA: And when he found out that I am going to Cincinnati, Ohio, he says it’s right across the Ohio River and would you call my friend and I am sending him a Swedish package. And I said sure.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Hana’s English wasn’t very good when she arrived in America. So when it came time to call Mosley’s friends to give them the package, she was nervous. She dialed their number, practicing her English in her head as she waited for the ring.
She introduced herself and invited them to come to her new home.
HANA DUBOVA: They asked me where I lived and they said they can not go to that neighborhood to pick up the package.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: In other words, Mosley’s friend couldn’t come to Hana because he was black and she lived in a white neighborhood.
HANA DUBOVA: So, I did not know why. So, I said, then I go deliver it to you. And, Mrs. Weil says you can not, you’re not permitted to go there. And I says, I have been all over Europe and I can go in Cincinnati whereever I want to go.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Hana had no idea why they were making it such a big deal. She had no experience with this type of segregation based on race. But after some debate, they came to a compromise. Hana could go meet Mosley’s friend if she was accompanied by their son, Joe.
HANA DUBOVA: And I got on the bus and we met in a restaurant and it was a black uhh part of Cincinnati.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Mosley’s friend was wearing a green hat and a well-pressed suit. Hana greeted him and gave him the gifts that Mosley had sent. He thanked her and invited her to dinner at his parent’s house. This was exciting. She accepted the invitation.
But then, as my grandmother told me years later, Joe exploded, telling her she couldn’t go anywhere with this family. Because they were black. Hana pulled away from Joe and said she’d be going to their house for dinner whether he liked it or not. She’d been on her own for 11 years and no one was now going to start telling her what to do.
Then, right there on the public square, Joe slapped her. My grandmother told me that not even during the war had anyone physically hit her.
Hana left Joe and went to Mosley’s friends for dinner. She described their house as being immaculate. It was the first time she’d encountered plastic slip covers on a couch. :)
They were patient with her English as she tried to describe what life was like in Sweden. The conversation halted at times, but it was warm.
At the end of the evening, they walked Hana back to the bus stop and she rode the bus through Cincinnati. She watched her reflection in the window as she traveled through this new city that she was supposed to call home. It was December in the year 1950.
HANA DUBOVA: When I came back after delivering the package, my suitcase was in front of the house. And they said, they will not house a *bleep* lover. This was my first encounter with total prejudice by Jewish people towards black people. And it was very painful.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: I remember the exact moment my grandmother told me this story. It was just a month before she died. The last time we sat together in her apartment -- just the two of us. Telling stories.
I remember her looking at me with a serious face. Her body was in a reclined position in bed. Almost lying down. I was in a chair next to her bed. My feet were up on her mattress. My bare toes dug into the blanket that covered her skinny legs.
“So now I ask you,” she said to me. “Someone who has never met me before rescues me in Denmark during the war. And then someone who is vaguely related to me in Cincinnati, who knows all about the Holocaust and what I went through, kicks me out because I met a black man on the square. That’s what I had come to America for?” She paused and looked me in the eyes, “And now I sit here with my granddaughter on my deathbed.”
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Hana told me she slept in a park that night, the night she came home to her luggage on the porch, when they kicked her out.
HANA DUBOVA: I never had any contact with them again in my whole life. Although they were honest enough to give me the $200. And, I found myself a room in a boarding house. I shared a bed with a girl from Kentucky for $5 a week. And, umm, I joined the Jewish Community Center in Cincinnati and met some people there and I got a job in a speech and hearing clinic with my accent. Where they were supposed to teach proper speaking. So if you know, if there is an oxymoron, there it is.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Hana described her English as finally getting good enough that your hair wouldn’t stand up on your head when she spoke. In her mind, she sounded perfect. One of her responsibilities was to answer the phone, and schedule appointments.
HANA DUBOVA: So one lady calls up one day and I’m on the phone. I’m the only one. And she says to me, I am canceling the appointment for my husband because he passed away. So I says and where did he go? I had no idea about that expression. Passed away. She says what do you mean. I just told you she passed away. I says, is he coming back next week. And these are things when you are on your own and nobody teaches you the ropes, even if you know the language which can be pretty embarrassing.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: Once again, Hana made a life for herself that felt temporary.
HANA DUBOVA: I hated Cincinnati. I hated it. I hated the heat and the summer. There was no air conditioning. Lipstick on the dresser which totally melted down the dresser. It was so hot and so humid and coming from Sweden, I wasn’t really used to that.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: As a child in Prague, she had learned about the famous, 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. She’d always wondered what the city looked like.
HANA DUBOVA: So I said to myself. Nothing is holding me here. And I decided I want to see the city, where I heard about there was a big earthquake once upon a time.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: So, she began saving money.
HANA DUBOVA: I made $35 a week. I spent $5 a week for my room accommodation. I ate here for 10 cents, 20 cents. So, I quit my job. I bought a round trip ticket, just in case, and I took the train and went to California.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: I followed my grandmother’s story across America. I took the train from New York to Cincinnati and then followed her up to Chicago where she boarded the famous California Zephyr -- an iconic train ride that took me from America’s heartland to the West Coast. I stopped in Denver like she did. And also in Salt Lake City, like she did, before making my way to San Francisco.
I followed her along this route both before my husband died and after. Because in the wake of grief, everything looked different. Everything felt different. The trees were more green. The nighttime sky was darker. The midnight kisses I watched happen on train station platforms lingered for longer. The sunrises felt brighter. The music I soundtracked my ride to felt spiritual. It was as if before, my ability to understand the emotions hidden within my grandmother’s writings had been limited.
Bent -- the rabbi in Copenhagen has helped me work through some of the questions that arise from this fact.
BENT MELCHIOR : I somehow accept that even our ability to think and to understand is limited. Our senses are limited. We can hear, most of us, can hear. But only within a certain limit of tones. If they are too high or too deep, the ear doesn’t work. We can see up to a certain distance, but no longer. Our senses are limited and why should our understanding and our knowledge not be limited. Of course it is limited.
RACHAEL CERROTTI: When she got to California, Hana wrote a letter to a friend in Cincinnati. One line sits deep inside of me. It reads, quote “On the train to Denver, I met in the dining car a gentleman who struck up a conversation with me. I was rather glad to be able to talk to someone, but told him a lie. I said that I am going to visit my family on the West Coast as he might have thought it quite odd if I told him the truth.”
Sometimes I imagine what conversations would be like with my grandmother today. I would ask her how often she chose to keep her story to herself for the sake of others. I would ask if it was hard to lie -- to pretend that her past was gentle. I try to imagine what she would say to me if she knew just how deeply I have fallen into researching her history. I think she would challenge my interest. She would question me. “You know enough of this story already,” she would say. “Why not care about something else?”
And then I daydream about telling her all about the people I met. About Sine on the farm. And Dasa’s children in Copenhagen. And Rabbi Bent Melchior and the Persson family in Sweden. I imagine telling her that it was because of her story that Sergio and I got together. I would explain to her that I went out to chase the stories of the dead and found myself a beautiful life.
Her diaries have become like a bible for me. The way my grandmother describes her life at the age of 14 is as poetic as how she writes about her life when she is 80. Her diaries and letters are the literature of her past. And each tells a slightly different story. I read and reread her stories like they are fables, modern day fairytales that are constantly changing meaning. Every time I open to a familiar page, I read the words in a new way.
And this, I would tell her, is why I keep going back.
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OUTRO (Rachael Cerrotti): You’ve been listening to ‘We Share The Same Sky’, the story of my decade-long journey to retrace my grandmother’s war story. It was produced by Erika Lantz and me.
You can find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts and other podcast apps. Please subscribe, rate and leave a review. We’re also on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
A big thank you to Marcy Gringlas, Joel Greenberg and Seed The Dream Foundation for their support. And to USC Shoah Foundation for their dedication to keeping these stories alive. My grandmother’s story is one of nearly 55,000 testimonies in their archive from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides. This podcast is also supported by Echoes & Reflections, a program for Holocaust education throughout the United States.
We Share The Same Sky is full of beautiful music. Thank you to the artists, including: Lee Rosevere, Daniel Birch, Chad Crouch, Blue Dot Sessions, Kai Engel, Sergey Cheremisinov, Axletree, Faserklang, Meydan, David Hilowitz, Mise Darling, Jeorg Mueller, Chris Zabriskie, Cousin Silas, and Kevin Buckland
And special thanks to Children Beyond, Paul Kalkbrenner and Idan Raichel.
Every episode of We Share The Same Sky comes with photographs, videos, and a curriculum that you can use in the classroom! Learn more at sharethesamesky.com.
I’m Rachael Cerrotti. Thanks for listening.
*This episode includes music by Blue Dot Sessions, Chad Crouch, Cousin Silas & David Buckland, Idan Raichel, and Paul Kalkbrenner*