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.
In August 2008, my son Mike and I traveled to Prague to see my birthplace, explore the city, and pay our respects to Sofie, my grandmother. First, we explored the world of Bohemian beer. Mike wondered whether Josef Stein, Mike’s great-grandfather, played a role in selling hops, yeast, and barley to brewers in Eastern Europe? Mike often recreated historic beers, and he was eager to learn if Josef had any beer-brewing experiences.
I was seven years old in 1943 when my father disappeared. It was the fourth year of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, and he was not at home. I kept asking my mother about my father, and her standard reply became, “Don’t worry—he is on a business trip and will be back as soon as he can.” At first, I believed her, but I wanted a fuller explanation. I missed my father terribly, but my mother never told me that he was assigned to a hard labor battalion or, later in 1944, that he was sent to Theresienstadt. She could not tell me the truth.
Listen to or read Holocaust survivors’ experiences, told in their own words through oral histories, written testimony, and public programs.