Monument: A New Documentary About What It Means To Remember
Michael Turner
My grandma Alice "Lici" Lichtenstein/Craig would tell my brother and I stories about growing up in Sárvár, Hungary– stories about her father's kosher bakery, where the town's Jewish community would buy challah on Fridays and leave their cholent in the still-warm oven to pick up after synagogue for the Sabbath meal. My grandma grew up in that bakery, starting in a bassinet on the counter, where as a baby and then as a little girl helping after school, she would watch her father work.
She had just turned 16 when the Nazis entered Hungary and rounded up 400,000 Jews from the countryside into ghettos and then deported them to death camps like Auschwitz. 885 of them came from Sárvár, including my grandma, her two sisters, and her parents.
What happened next was not discussed in our family. Even my mom, my grandma's only child, knew next to nothing about what happened to my grandma in the Holocaust. Once, when I was maybe 7 or 8, I asked her if we could go to Sárvár together one day. Her face turned serious. "I'll never set foot there again as long as I live." She didn't say anything more, and I didn't ask any more questions.
As I approached bar mitzvah age, something changed inside my grandma. She surprised our family by suddenly returning to Hungary for the first time since she left 50 years earlier. She told an interviewer that she didn't know what to expect– she just needed to see Sárvár again. And what she found there disturbed her to the core: it was like Jewish people had never lived there at all. The synagogues had been demolished or became office buildings, strangers had moved into their homes, and the town’s 885 Jewish residents had disappeared without a trace.
I was too young to know the right questions to ask, the right approach to her trauma. What I knew was that she had started traveling back and forth to Hungary, working on a project that would consume what remained of her life: a monument to the Jewish community of Sárvár.