My mother and her sister are child Holocaust survivors. Not a day goes by that doesn’t involve Holocaust remembrance in some form, casting a long shadow across her life and a ripple through the generations of her family. Her father was murdered in a slave labour camp near Lviv in 1942, a memory too painful for her own mother to talk about after the war, though her postwar diary recalls his last days with agony and lament. She and her two girls survived in hiding, both because of and despite the actions of ordinary strangers around her.
No other relatives escaped, perishing either in Belzec extermination camp or in the shooting pits of Janowska, Lviv. I have visited their unmarked graves.
