Echoes of Memory provides survivors who volunteer at the Museum with a powerful outlet to share their experiences and memories—through their own writing. In these videos, survivors who participated in the workshop read a selection of their essays.
This program is one way the Museum enables eyewitnesses to the Holocaust to help new generations gain insight and understanding of Holocaust history from a deeply personal perspective.
We, the survivors who volunteer at the United States Holocaust Museum, often receive letters from students who wish to engage with a Holocaust survivor as part of a school project. Tansi is a 15-year-old sophomore in high school in California. She must have researched our survivor biographies and been moved by my experience and wanted to learn more. Her sensitive letter prompted me to reply to her and praise her for her perceptive questions.
We go on with our lives even though everything has changed because of the coronavirus. It has affected our physical connection with the outside world. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, like all the other museums in Washington, DC, has been closed since March. I miss riding on the metro and taking an Uber to give my talks to our visitors, giving tours, going to my Echoes of Memory writing workshops, and attending the survivor meetings. However, in the middle of this dark time in the world, it did not stop the Museum from sending out its message.
On Wednesday mornings at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I sit at a desk where other Holocaust survivors and I meet Museum visitors. I tell my story, and the story of my family’s survival.
Because I don’t speak publicly about my experiences during the Holocaust, I earn my so-called “keep” as a Museum volunteer by translating. Over the years, my husband, Marcel, and I have done many translations. Even though the texts given to us by the Museum for translating are varied, all of them show the horrors of the Holocaust but also people’s resilience, love of family, hope, and resistance.
A couple of weeks ago I shared my and my family’s Holocaust experience with a group of high school students in the Helena Rubinstein Auditorium of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I caught myself using the adjective “lucky” one too many times.
It’s Wednesday afternoon. As usual, Albert and I are sitting at the Donor and Membership Desk at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. As volunteers, we help visitors fill out membership applications, and we accept donations to the Museum. As survivors, our main responsibility is to hand out copies of our brief biographies and answer questions related to our Holocaust experiences.
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.
On November 21, 2009, I gave a speech as I was being inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington (JCCGW). The event was a dinner and fundraiser for children with special needs, a cause very dear to me since my son Dov has Down syndrome and has needed much help from organizations such as this one.
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.
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.
Listen to or read Holocaust survivors’ experiences, told in their own words through oral histories, written testimony, and public programs.
