Each year on Jan. 27, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp complex in Poland, an International Day of Commemoration memorializes the victims of the Holocaust. This somber day focuses on the destruction the Nazis and their collaborators inflicted on Jewish communities throughout Europe. But there is another way to honor those 6 million murdered: remembering the ways they lived, not only the ways they died.
I am a sociologist who focuses on Holocaust memory and education. My interest is both professional and personal – my grandparents were Holocaust survivors. During research into my own family history, I became absorbed by the largest body of writing collectively created by survivors in the postwar years: “yizker bikher,” which is Yiddish for “memorial books.”
