The Back Pages
Marsha Lederman goes looking for signs of her life in The Canadian Jewish News I
am emerging from a years-long exercise that could have been accomplished in a few days or even hours at my mother’s kitchen table. But instead of getting the information I needed while sitting with her in her Toronto condo, nursing tea and her famous apple cake, I have travelled to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the U.S. National Archives at College Park, Md., the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York—and, through the internet, all over the world. Only a pandemic stopped me from going back to Lodz, Poland, and Kaunitz, Germany. I was hours away from my overseas flight when then-president Donald Trump announced the U.S. was closing the borders with Europe and I decided to stay put. And still, I don’t have all the answers, not even close. Over the last few years, I have been working on a book about grief and intergenerational trauma, a memoir, and one for which I needed as much information about my parents’ lives as possible, especially their experiences during the Holocaust. My mother became a forced labourer at 15 in the Radom Ghetto, then a forced labourer in a munitions factory, and was later deported to Auschwitz. After three months, she was transported to a satellite camp of Buchenwald, again to make weapons for her enslavers. At the end of March 1945, she was forced on a death march, and three days later, liberated by the U.S. Army in the village of Kaunitz. My father, from Lodz, and a slave labourer in the Piotrkow-Trybunalski Ghetto, managed to procure false papers and escape into Germany. He spent more than two years on a farm, pretending to be someone else: Tadeusz Rudnicki, Catholic Pole. I knew these basic facts, but there were so many gaps. I started digging to find out whatever I could. Of all the exercises I could have chosen to get me through a pandemic—and some personal grief— maybe this wasn’t the wisest one. But there was more that I wanted from this pursuit: not just to know about my parents’ traumatic experiences and horrific losses, but to learn more about their lives. The good parts. Their childhoods, but also how they rebuilt their lives in Canada, where they were able to buy a little house, a business. Raise a family of three daughters.
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