Holocaust Education Month 2022 Descendants Program – November 13th, 2:00 pm.
By Kara Goodwin
Beyond the ink on a page, a handwritten letter tells a story of its own. Letters are a very personal historical record. On November 13th, please join CHES for a HEM virtual presentation on the theme of letters in Holocaust memory and descendant narratives.
Presentations will be by renowned Holocaust historian and author, Dr. Deborah Dwork, Rose Professor of Holocaust History and Founding Director of the Strasser Centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, and Rachael Cerrotti, a trailblazing author, educator, and the inaugural storyteller in residence for USC Shoah Foundation. They will discuss how family letters inspire and inform their recent works.
Listening to survival stories from her aunt and uncle led Dwork to her work as a historian and writer. In Holding on Through Letters: Jewish Families during the Holocaust, Dwork focuses on the ways that Jewish families in Nazi Europe tried to hold onto each other through letters under wartime conditions. Letters, which were censored and often could not be sent between countries at war with each other, somehow became threads stitching loved ones into each other’s constantly changing daily lives. In “Dear Tante Elisabeth’” (2016), Dwork shared the story of Elisabeth Lus, the middle-aged Christian woman from Switzerland who voluntarily bridged the gap between families torn apart by the Holocaust. To bypass the censor, she helped hundreds of children and parents communicate by copying in her own handwriting each one of the letters they exchanged and stashed the originals in a box in her home.
“What do our family stories mean for us, and what have we learned from past generations?” Cerrotti explores these questions and more in her podcast and book, We Share the Same Sky. The granddaughter of a survivor from Czechoslovakia, Cerotti spent her twenties documenting and retracing her grandmother’s journey of statelessness and survival. Part memoir, part testimony, and a dynamic example of intergenerational narrative, We Share the Same Sky was the first ever narrative podcast based on a Holocaust survivor’s testimony.
Register here: https://sidepony.ca/ches-november-13
