Shoah Stories

My parents, Hania Sternlicht and Avrum Kurz, married on March 21, 1939, after a courtship that began in their teens. Six months later, my mother ...

I grew up in a family of survivors, in a community of survivors in Brooklyn. While I’m lucky to still have my parents and my ...

Today, Jimmy and I have the privilege of talking about the role that my father, Judah Nadich, zichrono livracha—or rather our father, since Jimmy’s relationship ...

A month ago, I got a call from BJ asking whether I would speak about what it means to be the child of Holocaust survivors. ...

One day, when my mother was 11, her father did not come home from work. He had been arrested and detained for being a Jew. ...

The Dimentstein family resided in Florence for eight months while awaiting their U.S. visa. Chanka and Pinya were married in Venice in one of the ...

When my parents, Freya and Ludwig Maier, returned from their honeymoon in early February  1933, Hitler had been chancellor of Germany for just a few ...

My mother was able to fully appreciate and celebrate the many good things in her life: the birth of two sons; their marriages to exceptional ...

The few photos I have reveal a sharply dressed couple standing or sitting close together, my grandmother, Rosa, smiling warmly at the camera, and my ...

I am telling you about Frida on this Yom Kippur, a day primarily dedicated to seeking repentance and forgiveness. But it is also a day ...

I am overjoyed that for my sons, silence will be transcended by memory. Meeting these individuals was truly improbable and miraculous; the moments spent in ...

These pieces of the puzzle enabled me to patch together a reasonable narrative. As the truth slowly emerged, I couldn’t help but wonder why it ...

In 1976, I met Madame Nana Ruyts, by then widowed from Oscar Ruyts, who had taken in my parents, Mendel and Leah, and hidden them ...

Poland is a beautiful country, but I will go there only once more—to visit with my family the same places that I visited with my ...

It is 1936; I am 5 years old. We live in Prague. I have just started collecting stamps and get great pleasure in knowing how ...

We had just about the same amount of space in Jerusalem as I had had in the ghetto. We lived through another war. But this ...

This is a story about me, my parents, and the family that rescued me, and the circumstances in Lithuania when I was a baby. It ...

Like snowflakes swirling past each other on a winter’s wind, my parents and my children never touched. Their descent into the Holocaust and their slow ...