(Jewish Group) My family's worst moment is captured in 'Maus.' Its ban gravely disappoints me [View all]
Have you ever discovered an incident from your own family’s history in a famous work of art? I have.
As a child, my mother would tell me stories about our family’s experiences during the Holocaust. Some of them had happened to her parents, Chaya and Mendel, who had fled to the Soviet Union after the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Most of the stories about our extended family were conveyed to my grandparents, uncles and mother for the first time in the late 1950s when my grandmother’s sister Leah came to visit them in Israel. A survivor of Auschwitz, she had emigrated to France after the war.
The most horrifying story was about Chaya and Leah’s first cousin Hela. On Sept. 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland, she and her husband were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on their way to New York’s World’s Fair. They had left behind a teenage son and a young daughter and were now powerless to help them.
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