Echoes of Memory

What Makes You Tick in the Morning?

I have been retired for more than ten years, so Friday is not my last day of the week at work; therefore, TGIF has a different meaning for me.

The World Would Be a Better Place If Everyone Were like Esther from the Bible

My Name Is Grace-Elizabeth Riley

In 1965 Louis Armstrong came to Budapest, and he sang in front of 80,000 people in a soccer stadium. I was among the lucky ones who paid an inordinate amount of money for a ticket in the nosebleed section of the stadium.

Every Day is a New Gift

According to Jewish lore, every night when we go to sleep, our souls are taken back by G-d. For those who are granted another day to live, their souls are returned the next morning.

A Small Room to Be Remembered

In April 1944, we had to move to a government-mandated house for Jews (a Yellow Star House), later to an apartment under the protection of the Swiss embassy, and finally into the Budapest ghetto.

The Choices We Make, Part I

There have been many moments in my adult life when I have had to make a decision. Sometimes, I had to choose one option from a list of many. Sometimes, I had only two bad options. And, rarely, I had two good ones.

Closure, Part II

Closure has many definitions in dictionaries, as well as professional guidelines where the word is part of the terminology or jargon. In my experience, closure means different things to different individuals.

Closure, Part I

Presenting my family’s Holocaust history to a live audience is never easy. I am always looking forward to the last ten to 15 minutes of the presentation, which is a question-and-answer session.

In Memoriam: Marty Weiss

I had this premonition that it would happen while I was out of the country. And it did. I was in Tel Aviv when I got the news that Marty, my friend, had only a few days left to live, and I was back in Budapest when I got the note from his daughter, Gail, that Marty was not with us anymore.

The Choices We Make, Part 2

Our life is an endless series of choices and consequences from those choices. Many choices are reversible if the outcome is not satisfactory, but at least one is not: the choice between life and death.