I remember as a child, my grandmother taking hold of my hand and circling my palm with her pointer finger. It would tickle, but I let her continue. “Life will give you callouses,” she told me. “But, with each one, your skin will become thicker.”
My grandmother’s name was Hana and growing up, I knew her story—at least a version of it. I knew she was a Holocaust survivor. I knew she lost her whole family in the war. And, I knew she spent her teenage and young adult years as a refugee. But, as a kid I didn’t have the language nor the maturity to understand what that meant. I took the history for granted. But that is what grandchildren do — we accept the stories that came before us as normal.
When I first asked Hana for her story, it was the summer of 2009 and I simply thought that it would be an opportunity to spend one-on-one time with her. I knew that one day I would be grateful to have her testimony — as she would give it from grandmother to granddaughter — but I had no idea that it would come to shape the entirety of my young adult life.
In the years that followed, I became entranced with her story. I spent years sitting on my bedroom floor in Boston, organizing and digitizing her archive. I scanned every photograph and rewrote every diary. All the words she had written went from her fingertips to mine. I went through each delicate piece of paper, taking note of how she moved from one place to another and who helped her along the way.
When that wasn’t satisfying enough, I traveled to Europe to find the people who helped save her life during the war. And then, I moved in with their descendants. I lived side by side with them as my grandmother had done. My insatiable curiosity and ever-growing desire to touch the past led me into the lives of countless strangers. It took me across Central Europe, Scandinavia and the United States, many times over. My grandmother’s story led me to my husband—a wonderful Polish man named Sergiusz who I married when I was 26. And her story held my hand when he died suddenly and I was widowed at the age of 27. Hana’s story of loss during the Holocaust became my guidebook for how to live a life narrated by death and empowered by grief.
It’s been nearly a decade and a half since I first sat down with my grandmother and asked for her story. And in that time, this project has taken many forms. It began as a family history project and then became a photojournalism project. I have written articles and told the story on the radio. I have taken this documentary work and created curriculums for students young and old. I lead writing workshops and host intergenerational programming around the topic of family history. I have presented in hundreds of congregations and communities as well as international conferences and at embassies. I produced a podcast about this story, titled We Share The Same Sky which is now being used in high school classrooms across the United States as a way of teaching Holocaust history through a contemporary perspective. In August 2021, I released a memoir (my first book) also titled We Share The Same Sky and in the fall of 2023, I opened my first museum exhibition which tells this story through Hana’s artifacts and my own. That exhibition is currently on view at the Florida Holocaust Museum and will travel to other museums in the forthcoming years.
My grandmother described the Holocaust as an “indescribable black page in history.” This story is about what happens when you turn the page.