She has traveled to 18 former concentration camps, killing centers and the remains of forced labor camps. Hannah worked side-by-side with the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. for historical accuracy in her research.
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My father, a Holocaust survivor, was never a victim. His unresolved grief and sadness became a catalyst for ambition. His parents were Orthodox Jews who, in my father’s words, “never had money in the bank and lived hand to mouth.” As one of eight children, he was the only member of his family to survive, including his parents and grandparents. Yet there was always a shadow of Poland behind my father.
Before the camps, my father was forced into the ghetto in Bedzin, in German-occupied Poland. He was allowed to leave the residential district only to do forced labor, working for starvation wages making uniforms for soldiers.
My father was in daily direct contact with death. Starving and weakened yet he didn’t give up hope. He walked with death, and lived so that I could tell his story. As I walked the grounds at Treblinka, where his brother was machine-gunned down, I found myself humming Hebrew songs, chanting the prayers of dead souls. When Dernau, the final camp he was in was liberated on May 8, 1945, he collapsed weighing just sixty-five pounds.
He remembers hearing someone say in Yiddish, “The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming.” He spent a year in a sanitarium called Marine House, a place mainly for people with tuberculosis.
I have traveled to Poland numerous times to retrace his steps to see the camps he was forced into and the killing centers where his family was murdered. Dernau, in particular, quieted me while awakening every sense.