As a child, I held conflicting beliefs. I knew my Jewish grandfather had been murdered by Germans in occupied Yugoslavia, yet I somehow believed the Holocaust had never come to his hometown of Belgrade. The family anecdotes my father passed down, a blend of his early memories and what my grandmother told him, didn’t match what I had heard about Germany, Poland, and Anne Frank in Holland during World War II. That started me on a lifelong journey to learn everything I can about the Holocaust, especially in parts of Europe that have received less attention, and to understand the long-reaching effects of genocide on the survivor’s children and grandchildren.
I wrote...
Hidden in Plain Sight: A Family Memoir and the Untold Story of the Holocaust in Serbia
This book took me to places I was not expecting. I love memoirs like this that are stranger than fiction. Kaiser’s memoir starts simply enough with his father’s request that he check out a building his grandfather owned before World War II. But then it twists and twists again. Come for the history, stay for the adventure.
An unputdownable tale of one man's quest to recover his family's property, plundered by the Nazis.
Menachem Kaiser's brilliantly told story is set in motion when the author takes up his Holocaust-survivor grandfather's former battle to reclaim the family's property in Sosnowiec, Poland. Here, he meets a Polish lawyer known as 'The Killer' who agrees to take his case and becomes involved with a band of Silesian treasure-seekers, all the while piecing together his family's complex history.
Propelled by rich, original research, Kaiser immerses readers in profound questions that reach far beyond his personal quest. What does it mean to…
From the minute Glenn Kurtz found a decaying tape of his parents’ trip to Poland in 1938, I was hooked. I’ve imagined being able to glimpse the world my grandparents inhabited in “the Old Country.” And here it was for Kurtz: some of the only film footage of a Jewish world erased by the Holocaust in the last months before it was gone forever.
I was fascinated to follow along with Kurtz as he becomes a detective working to discover who is in the recorded three minutes, where they are, and what they are doing. But that’s just the beginning; as he discovers the past, he makes connections in the present and changes lives in the process.
Traveling in Europe in August 1938, one year before the outbreak of World War II, David Kurtz, the author's grandfather, captured three minutes of ordinary life in a small, predominantly Jewish town in Poland on 16 mm Kodachrome colour film. More than seventy years later, through the brutal twists of history, these few minutes of home-movie footage would become a memorial to an entire community, an entire culture that was annihilated in the Holocaust. Three Minutes in Poland traces Glenn Kurtz's remarkable four year journey to identify the people in his grandfather's haunting images. His search takes him across the…
This is a shining example of how our stories begin before we are born. Cerotti’s fascination with her grandmother’s unusual wartime story became her sort of full-time job, and I loved getting to come along for the ride. Through these pages, I got to learn about a part of the Holocaust that’s not talked about much: what happened to Jews in Scandinavia.
Like all excellent 3G (grandchildren of Holocaust survivors) memoirs, Cerotti doesn’t just tell the story of her family’s past; the reader sees how that past is not really past at all. Cerotti meets characters in her grandmother’s story and changes her present in the process.
In 2009, Rachael Cerrotti, a college student pursuing a career in photojournalism, asked her grandmother, Hana, if she could record her story. Rachael knew that her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor and the only one in her family alive at the end of the war. Rachael also knew that she survived because of the kindness of strangers. It wasn’t a secret. Hana spoke about her history publicly and regularly. But, Rachael wanted to document it as only a granddaughter could. So, that’s what they did: Hana talked and Rachael wrote.
Upon Hana’s passing in 2010, Rachael discovered an incredible archive…
Wildman’s obsession made me keep turning the pages long past when I should have been sleeping. She is a journalist, so when she discovers the mystery of a secret folder of letters from her grandfather’s old girlfriend, she sets out to discover why they were separated and what happened to his first love.
One woman’s journey to find the lost love her grandfather left behind when he fled pre-World War II Europe, and an exploration into family identity, myth, and memory.
Years after her grandfather’s death, journalist Sarah Wildman stumbled upon a cache of his letters in a file labeled “Correspondence: Patients A–G.” What she found inside weren’t dry medical histories; instead what was written opened a path into the destroyed world that was her family’s prewar Vienna. One woman’s letters stood out: those from Valy—Valerie Scheftel—her grandfather’s lover, who had remained behind when he fled Europe six months after the Nazis annexed…
Our experiences are quite different; Newmann grew up in Venezuela and didn’t know her father was Jewish, let alone that he’d survived the Holocaust. Yet, what drew me in was her desire to understand the pieces of her family story that were unexplained and the secrets that didn’t quite make sense.
Her quest to understand her father and his family, whom she never got to meet, kept me engaged until the end. We need to understand our past to understand ourselves.
In this astonishing story that “reads like a thriller and is so, so timely” (BuzzFeed) Ariana Neumann dives into the secrets of her father’s past: “Like Anne Frank’s diary, it offers a story that needs to be told and heard” (Booklist, starred review).
In 1941, the first Neumann family member was taken by the Nazis, arrested in German-occupied Czechoslovakia for bathing in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book.
Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of the…
Discover an untold chapter of Holocaust history and a daughter’s enduring quest to know how her father survived as a young Jewish boy in Belgrade, where Nazis murdered 90% of the Jewish population without gas chambers or cattle cars.
Through meticulous research, a bit of luck, and three emotional trips to Serbia, Julie Brill pieces together her family’s lost past, learns hidden family secrets, and returns to her father a small part of what the Nazis stole: his own family history.
The Curiosity Cycle is a book for parents and educators who want to teach their children to be active explorers of the world. Learning through curiosity leads to adaptive thinking because your child is continually trying to improve his or her understanding of the world, and new facts and ideas become embedded in the knowledge that your child already has. Curiosity will also enrich your child's life because curiosity-based learning is internally directed and intrinsically motivated.
Our world is rapidly changing, and our children must be able to filter the cacophony of voices in cyberspace to stay true to their…
The Curiosity Cycle: Preparing Your Child for the Ongoing Technological Explosion
Through curiosity, children carve out concepts from the environment that they assemble into models to describe the world. Children then test those models to see how well they predict what they observe, and they use the results from those experiments to form new concepts and models---leading to the next round of the curiosity cycle. However, our children are more than passive observers. They are an embodied part of the world and have brains that are predisposed to see the environment in particular ways. To get the most from their curiosity, children must build models about the intentions of those around…
