 to turn the mic on, there we go, sorry about that. Good evening everyone, I'm Dale McNeil, I'm one of the assistant directors here at the library. I hope you've had a chance this evening to have refreshments if you haven't and you want to have some, feel free to get up while I'm talking, it won't bother me in the least. So I just wanted to say that. So thank you so much for being here this evening for the closing reception for this year's Holocaust Learn and Remember series. This is the eighth year that we've done this program here at the San Antonio Public Library and I think it's just getting better and better with each year and I really appreciate you being here as part of it. I want to acknowledge and thank Nowcast SA for being here tonight. They're providing a live stream of this event for people unable to join us and of course you can also probably watch later. The live stream will be available on Nowcast SA for those who wish to share that with their family and friends. We're really excited the San Antonio Public Library to be part of this program, Learn and Remember that was conceived here at the San Antonio Public Library really more than eight years ago, about nine years ago we had the idea and the program was created in partnership with many individuals but primarily also with the Holocaust Museum of San Antonio and I want to acknowledge the library staff and also the staff from the museum and the Federation who have all really helped with this program over the years. It wouldn't really be possible obviously without the work of those staff. So thank you very much. This program I think is extremely important to enlighten our community, to help promote tolerance and to provide members of our community a deeper understanding of the importance of acceptance and respect. And I think here we are in 2020 and it just only feels more important I think than before. This program and many other programs at the library are made possible by the support of the San Antonio Public Library Foundation and I would really like to acknowledge the foundation, all of their board members, executive board members, it really, and donors, let me not forget donors to the foundation because it's those people who really make this possible so we really appreciate the foundation. And I'd also like to acknowledge that there are members of the Friends of the Library of various branches here and I really appreciate what the Friends do by the Friends supporting local branches and supporting programs of the Central Library, the foundation can do what they do. It really takes both organizations working together. So I would especially tonight like to recognize also that Jasmine Rodriguez is here from Congressman Castro's office so thank you so much for joining us this evening. We really appreciate it. And Library Trustee Marcy Ince is here from District Nine. Thank you so much for joining us Marcy. And I would now like to introduce Julie Zucker, Education Coordinator of the Holocaust Memorial Museum of San Antonio and she will introduce our speaker and we'll be on with our program. Good evening everyone. My name is Julie Zucker and I'm proud to serve as the Education Coordinator for the Holocaust Memorial Museum of San Antonio, the largest program of the Jewish Federation, the jewel of our San Antonio Jewish community and unfortunately the best kept secret in the city. The mission of the museum is in memory of the six million Jews and the millions of other victims who were murdered to teach the dangers of hatred, prejudice and apathy and to promote good citizenship, democratic values and respect for human dignity. Why do we do this? In the words of Maxine Cohen who is one of the founders and first director of our museum to light the path to a better world where all of us see ourselves in the faces of strangers. I encourage you to come visit the museum. We're located on the second floor of the building of the campus of the Jewish community. Most people think we're just the JCC but there's a lot in that building and we're at the corner of Northwest Military Highway and Weirsbach Parkway. We're open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m. Admission is always free. We have programs throughout the year and groups of 20 or more can schedule a complimentary guided tour with us. Our exhibits detail the events that happened before, during and after the Holocaust. We have many programs throughout the year including my book club HMMSA Reads. The last book we read was Letters to Saleh in our most recent meeting. I stand here today because my great grandparents escaped their respective countries of Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania in the 1920s. They found refuge in the United States making this country their home. But not all of my relatives were so lucky. My great uncle, Nachlem Gruber, was murdered at Auschwitz as were many of my cousins and other relatives who stayed behind. I do this work because I personally have the responsibility to tell their stories and to ensure that such horrors never happen again. This occasion also coincides with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which was marked a few days ago. We as a community and as a larger humanity also hold responsibility for ensuring our world never experiences another Holocaust. We are gathered here today because this month marks the eighth annual Holocaust Learn and Remember program. That program started with a simple breakfast meeting and a conversation. Our museum started with a simple phone call. Today we have the pleasure of learning about the story of Saleh Garnkarnskirchner, which started with a few simple letters in a more complicated time. Caroline Weinberg, granddaughter of Saleh Garnkarnskirchner, will speak about her grandmother's story of surviving five years in Nazi slave labor camps. Ms. Garnkarnskirchner's experiences are portrayed here in the Letters to Saleh exhibit. Please join us after the presentation to see the gallery exhibit one last time. Caroline Weinberg is an activist and organizer from New York City. She is the founder and program director of Plan A, an organization that brings reproductive and sexual healthcare to rural and underserved communities. She is the granddaughter of Saleh Kirchner, a Holocaust survivor who preserved hundreds of letters received from family and friends during her time in Nazi concentration camps. She carried the letters with her through the war on her journey to New York as a young bride. And ultimately, they made their way to the permanent collection at the Jewish Division of the New York Public Library. Please welcome Caroline Weinberg. Hi, thank you so much for coming and thank you to the San Antonio Public Library for having me, but more, well, more importantly for having this exhibit, for introducing my, you can't hear me? Is that what you're saying? Okay, for introducing everyone to the story of my grandmother through this remarkable exhibit, which was curated by Jill Wexler and put together through the work of my mom. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my grandmother's story and who she is and kind of how it all fits together from our perspective. So until I was 10-ish, the only thing we knew about my grandmother before she kind of was plopped down in America and had my mom and my uncles was this photograph, which my grandmother's the one on the right, and we knew that it was taken during the time that she was in the Holocaust, but knew nothing about it. It was just this mysterious black and white photo in her house and this was the only bubby that we knew. So this was Salakarshan Earth, that's me on her lap and my sister and my two cousins and that was kind of the totality of who she was to us was bubby. And I grew up completely fascinated by the Holocaust and reading everything I could and watching all the movies and listening to all the stories and we knew nothing about what had happened to my grandmother. And we later discovered that it was because it was a conscious decision that she had made. She didn't want us to look at her and see someone who was a survivor or see someone who had been through horrible experiences. She just wanted to be bubby or mom before she was bubby. So it was a conscious decision, but it left this kind of vacuum in our family history that none of us really knew anything about until in 1991 when she was having open heart surgery and she was worried that she wasn't gonna make it, which she did. And she came to my mom and kind of unceremoniously handed her a game box and said, these are my letters from the war. And my mom was, what are you talking about? And basically what bubby said was, I kept these from the time that I was in the camps and I don't want them to get thrown away. So take care of them for me basically. So then my mom was very excited by this obviously and said about translating all of these letters, which I can say in one sentence, it was a much longer process than that. They were German and Polish and Yiddish and she spent years translating these documents until finally after several years we had laid out the story of my grandmother and who she was when she kind of disappeared from her home in 1940 and then how she got to the bubby who we knew. And what had happened was in 1940 the German, before Hitler had fully kind of, before the final solution had come across and before anyone really knew what was happening, Germany sent letters to Jewish families saying, you have to send one person from your house to come and work in a camp with no specifics at all. And the letter came and asked to, and demanded that my Aunt Rizal be the one who goes. And she was the older sister, but she was like bookish and not particularly active, whereas my grandmother was the one who would sneak out of the house at night and climb on rooftops and play sports and like she was like the kind of badass of the two for lack of a better term, sorry, sorry mom. And so she volunteered to go, not knowing what was gonna happen, but it said you come, go to the camps, we'll send you home on vacation after a little bit, like it's gonna be fine, so she volunteers to go. So while she was there, she continuously received letters from home and that began this correspondence between her and her family and continually was her one thread to her life before the war. And when the letters first came about, my mom had these very, she's a professor and she really took a historical perspective on it. So she like laid down kind of figuring out all of the specifics, where you were when and getting them translated and putting out the whole timeline and really knowing how everything worked and what my siblings and I and my cousins got out of my grandmother was much more kind of anecdotes that filled things that weren't brought up in the letters. So when my mom would sit down with these documents and find out, okay, what camp you were in, my grandmother would be telling us stories that kind of wouldn't come across in the letter and she would, we had spent so long not hearing anything from her that when she would start to tell a story, you'd go like dead quiet, cause you didn't wanna like shake her out of the fact that she was like finally sharing something like we were, she had come home, my grandmother lost her hair as she got older and had this kind of, the whole time I knew her, had this like big net of hair. And she was like, so she had been at a wedding where they like threw confetti and so it all fell in the net and she couldn't get it out. And I say this with affection, I hope she wouldn't be embarrassed by this. And I sat behind her on a couch with the tweezer basically like plucking, plucking all of the stuff out of her hair. And she just, she started telling a story about how when she was in the camps, she and her friends every night would sit down and pick lice out of each other's hair and how they were all so proud that when they were liberated, all of them kept their like long, beautiful hair. And so it was things like that that would come out or when I was, I used to talk to my grandparents every Thursday and so I was calling them once when I was in college and I was standing outside like waiting for the bus and I was griping on the phone to my grandmother about how cold I was. What, meanwhile, I was in like a heavy coat of boots, like whatever, I was just being annoying. And she was like, oh, you're cold, are you wearing a coat? And I was like, yeah, I'm wearing a coat. We didn't have coats in the camps. And I was like, thanks, Bubby, for like putting everything in perspective. So she would kind of continually tell these stories but none of that and we valued it so much but then when we were able to read the letters which really got into the mindset of her family and herself when she had actually been there, it really changed our entire perspective on everything. She had carried these letters with her through seven different camps over five years and they were her way of keeping her connection to her family alive. And what was interesting about them and I'm gonna read from a couple of the letters is that when it first started, the letters were very similar to the kind of thing that I would have gotten from my parents at Sleepaway Camp. So this is her, my Aunt Rizal sending a letter to Salah. We were very happy to get your postcard, as you can imagine, but Salah, don't think we stopped worrying because we got it, nothing of the kind. You write so little, write more, how's the food, did you like it, do you cook? My mom was so excited when she got the postcard, she was the happiest person in the world. May your words prove to be the truth? As of now, David remains home, we don't know if he'll leave. Everyone's in good health. Salusha, who was her niece, kissed the postcard from her Aunt Salah a hundred times. And that is like literally a letter that would have come to me. Finally, you wrote, why didn't you tell me how fun camp was, it's just very standard, but then in it you see there are these little like kind of threads of mentioning whether or not her brother-in-law is gonna leave and them not knowing what that means. So there's these kind of subtle changes, but largely it's just kind of generic stories of home. In one of them, she asks if she's referencing the fact clearly that my grandmother had said that she was cooking in the camp because Rizal is like, oh maybe you'll come home a better housewife than you were when you left. So it's like, no one really knew what was happening and it was all these very casual exchanges. And also there was like, there's a constant thread of Jewish guilt really, running through it, of complaining about the fact that Bubbie doesn't write her enough. Why aren't you writing? Why aren't you telling more stories? And that just follows through everything, this desperation to hear more from Salah. And we don't have largely my grandmother's words, but there are parts where it says, I'm not able to write home as much as I want to, I know how much it stresses you out to not know where we are, but there's nothing I can do. And so that desperation to have these letters is really just like one of the most common threads. And so she continued to get these letters over the course of the camp and they're everything from these stories of normalcy to birthday cards that she received while she was in the camps, anecdotes about seeing friends from home, prayers for wellbeing, and nothing really, what's interesting about reading them is as was in the letter I just read, there's not really a mention of what's happening. You know, and it's, I mean, they were screened, you couldn't just write whatever you wanted. And so we, but then after the war when there was no longer screening, one of the letters that Ryzel sent to my mom, my grandmother had a composition in it that she had written right after the war, but was finally able to kind of share the story with my grandmother. And I'm just gonna read a portion of it because it, I don't know, because it's amazing. Six years of pain, suffering, and torment, hunger, cold, and heavy labor with no respite. Six years of struggle between life and death. In the end, we survived. We survived by some miracle because this mighty oppressor and cannibals' goal was to exterminate us all. We were only a fraction of that great mass of humanity which fell victim to the barbarism. We wanted to save our loved ones to help them to hold back the calamity which was approaching with lightning speed, but we were helpless. They were torn from us half alive to end their days in the hell of the crematoria. Now, just at this moment, when they could have lived to enjoy freedom which was granted to us after so much suffering, they are no longer here. Our hearts have scars that will never heal. We who are gathered together from all different cities, lands, and nations united only by our suffering feel deeply the absence of our dear ones. We do not hear the kittish of our fathers who were our pride. We do not see our mothers busily going about providing for our needs. Instead, strangers take care of us pitting us, but can they provide what we lack? No. Even people who feel compassion at our distress, who try to understand us, cannot have a true understanding because they did not experience our suffering. Only our mothers who unfortunately left us in such tragic circumstances could have understood us. We beg God to restore our destroyed homes, even if only in miniature, for those of us who remained alive so that we can find each other and thereby relieve our deep pain. When all kindred souls are united, we will celebrate the memory of those we lost. May their memory be blessed. And it's, I consider one of the, one of, there's obviously many tragedies within this, but one of the things that I regret most deeply is that we don't, we never spoke to Rizal really about her experiences in the war. So we have this, she was an amazing writer and told these amazing, she was just, she had such a gift for words and she just did not, that kind of ended after the war. And things like this just are so reflective of the amazing stories that, that Holocaust survivors are able to tell and that we're gradually losing over time and the power of being able to, one of the reasons that the letters is such an amazing thing to share and we think of them as, you know, they're family treasures, but also they fit within a much broader historical frame because they're such an unprecedented record of what people have gone through. There's such a limited number of writings by people during the war and just after it that it really is a remarkable thing to have, but most of what we had was told through the eyes of the people who wrote to Sala until, and I tell this story this way, my mom disagrees because she thinks she found this but she's wrong. Also, I'm just saying, mom, if you watch this, you're wrong. Until one day I was rooting around in my grandparents' house looking for old photos and I shouldn't still be on this. And I, looking for old photos and I found familiar looking handwriting and like fragile paper and it was a diary that Sala had kept when she first went to the camps and I hear myself kind of flipping between calling her Bubby and Sala. But this was Sala writing this. This is not the diary. But it was the first time that we really had, from her perspective, what had happened and so I'm just gonna read the beginning of her diary entry for when they first went. So my dearest, if you could have looked deep in my heart, you would have seen how desperate I was. Still I tried to keep a smile on my face as best I could though my eyes were filled with tears. One must go on bravely and courageously even if the heart is breaking. Mother dearest, I have not mentioned you until now. I was not looking at you though I was consumed by you. You were pleading with me, you were begging, almost yelling at me, yet I wanna do what I wanna do. It's so hard to say goodbye, but what can I say to you? I said nothing. I did not wish you anything, did not ask for anything, but still I could not stop looking at you, mother, because I felt something inside of me tearing, hurting. One more kiss, one more hug and my mother does not wanna let go of me. Let it end already, it is torture. We're starting to move. Goodbye everybody, remember me. Only please do not pity me because nobody forced me to do this. I got what I wanted. God help me. And then a day later, another thing that comes up frequently was the desperation of the fact that they could no longer celebrate their faith. They could no longer be Jewish in any way. And so it frequently comes up in letters from Rizal to my grandmother. And this was a time when we were able to hear from Salah specifically how that impacted her. And this is from her first week in the camps. Now the traditional Friday evening approaches, time for the family to be together and for closeness to uplift the soul. What a horrible day this is for me here. Again, my thoughts turn to home and again, I'm overwhelmed by despair. Dear God, will Fridays always worry me so much when I'm away from home? I shall not eat with you all at the same table or hear my father say, kiddish. No, I cannot be with you because I'm in a camp. My thoughts are with you. Can you feel my nearness to you? I walk around like a lunatic for I had nobody to share my sorrow nor anybody to console me as I cried my eyes out, finding it hard to breathe. It was stifling. Never before did I miss you so much, beloved parents and my dear friends. Today I was not with you when the prayers were said. I did not hear kaddish. Oh, my dear ones, did you remember me just then? I will find out when we're together again. And what was, what's, when I was, when I read things like this about, about their, about the separation from Judaism, which obviously is such a fundamental part of the Holocaust, I think about how when my grandmother first was liberated, she decided she didn't want to be Jewish anymore. She was like this, we went through too much. Like she's the Holocaust will happen again. I don't want anything to do with this. And then over time, she decided that to honor her father who had been a rabbi and her family members who had died, her, it was her responsibility to be Jewish. And so she raised my, my, my mom and my uncles as Orthodox Jews and Judaism has always, you know, remained, remained a constant in our family's lives. And I want to talk a little bit about, about who my grandmother was. When I was, I've been thinking a lot about when I was, it's she, my grandmother died almost two years ago. And this was, and working on this speech and kind of thinking through what I was gonna say was the first time that I've really like sat down and thought about kind of the role that we as, as the, as like the second and third generation Holocaust survivors have in telling this story that it was the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz and people who are Holocaust survivors that there's, they won't be with us forever. And what our role is continuing to tell these stories. And we have these amazing letters where she saved them because they were her greatest treasure. She buried, my grandmother buried the letters at every different camp she went to and passed them around and saved all of them. And they remain as the only record of these people who died. For example, so all of the letters went to the New York Public Library, but we saved one back for, one for each grandchild. And this is the one that I kept, which I kept because the, it's a letter from, from Reisel. But in the bottom, you can see the, like the careful lettering of, you know, just numbers and letters. And it's my, it's Bubby's niece, Celusia, who had been, who wanted to show my grandmother how hard she'd been working on her letters and how she'd like, learn to write. But that, like this letter is the only record that that child who died in Auschwitz when she was four or five years old exists. There's, my grandmother has died and there's, you know, there's no one left who remembers her. And so it stays alive here. And that's why the letters are so important. And that's why it's been amazing having exhibits in San Antonio and in New York and in Germany and all over the place and having the, there's a play about the letters and having people read the book in book club or on their own or whatever it will be, is it's a way of keeping people who would otherwise just not be remembered alive. But what I also think is important to talk about is, we talk about the story of survivors and everything that they went through and all of the experiences that they had and it's just absolutely vital to continue that conversation and to make sure that in an era when anti-Semitism is on the rise and when people doubt that historical things have happened and when horrible tragedies are happening to people all over the world constantly, that we talk about history and that we continue to keep these things alive. But I also think it's important to tell the stories of who these people were after the Holocaust. That the nature of survival is that they survived something terrible but also they survived. So what happens next? And so I also wanted to take the opportunity to tell you a little bit about Bubby after the Holocaust and because you'll see the exhibit and I've told stories and for those of you who've read the book, you know what happened before the war. So this is Bubby, this is Salah and my grandfather. They got married, they met as he was a Jewish soldier who they met in Ansbach, Germany after my grandmother had been liberated and they had a legal civil marriage in Germany and then she came over to the war bride and this is their wedding. That is a hand-me-down wedding dress because no one would spend the money to buy anyone. But what's been interesting also about and I think about it just seeing these pictures is that and this is kind of why I think it's so important to tell other stories is that my grandfather was a photographer and I spent many years digitizing the photos that he had taken. He traded a pack of cigarettes for a camera when he was a soldier in World War II. So he's these amazing pictures of his time during the war but he also has a complete documentation of their lives from the day they got to America until he stopped taking pictures when he was 90. And so I started digitizing all of them and sharing them on Tumblr, on a blog. And as I posted the pictures, people who had no idea who Bubby was before 1946. So before she came to America they didn't know her backstory or anything like that. They were responding to these amazing photos of people taken in New York in like the 40s and 50s and 60s and so on. And they were like, oh, this is an amazing wedding picture and they don't know that she had just been liberated from the camps six months before or that he had been a soldier or that she was still figuring out if she wanted to be Jewish or what the story is. They just knew that these were cool looking people. And it really made a parent to me how important it is to continue to tell the story of who they were beyond the Holocaust. This is another picture of my grandmother. I don't know where she is, I just love this picture. These are my grandparents. They used to host New Year's parties in Jackson Heights and my grandfather wore those glasses for like 40 years. This picture is probably like 1960 something or other. The table, yes, I mean, you can take from like the look but the table in the back, they never threw anything away so I grew up with that table in my grandparents' house and the lamp. That's my mom and my grandmother at the beach in Far Rockaway which they went to every year. That is my uncle Joey, my grandmother and my grandfather. They, when he first, they, so when my grandmother was, after she was liberated, no Jews really knew whether or not they had been sterilized, whether they'd be able to have kids and or a lot of people were suspicious that they wouldn't be able to and when she got pregnant with my uncle Joey who's the little boy on the left, he was like a, he was a godsend. He was proof to her that life would continue to go on and she just took him everywhere. She was like, she took him to see the Radio City Music Hall and she took him all over the city and she just decided she really wanted him to see their world and my grandfather, he worked during the week but during the summer would send them off to some farm so there's this whole series of photographs of them like frolicking on farms. And yeah, and that's also my uncle Joey and Salah. My, in 2004, I think, Joey died and I remember when we have these videos of my grandmother cooking and she was an amazing cook and she, my sister and I filmed them right before he died because we were like, she's not gonna be the same ever again after this happens, like we need to document as much as we can about Bubby and there's no, I mean the devastation of losing her son is obviously not something you ever recover from but when we were talking about it like a year later and she was still Bubby, we kind of, my sister and I looked at each other and we were like, well, she's like, she's a survivor. Like of course she was gonna find herself again and she found joy again and she and life went on much as it did after the Holocaust and it's just really a tribute to the will for life and her ability to survive. That's my nephew Dylan. This was maybe like four years ago, that's the house that we grew up in or not we grew up in, that's my grandmother's house that I grew up going to. That's my grandparents that is in my parents' house and my grandmother always had the same breakfast every single day, it's a fun fact to know about her. She, and as I said, was an amazing cook. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of her food but she made a kogel that was just the best thing you've ever eaten in your life. She made really good pudding. She, when she passed away and we were at Shiba, all of my cousins came and all of their kids and we all got together in the kitchen, in that kitchen actually. And we decided during Shiba to try to replicate my grandmother's wheat germ cookies because we were like, this is something that she always had for us every time we went over and so let's like try to make them as a tribute to Bubby and they came out terribly. And we were like, they were just awful and it was unfortunate deeply but it was, because we all have this moment of being like, oh man, we're never gonna have those cookies again because she, we had all of her recipes but there is, whether it was deliberate that she always left something out so we could never do it as well as she could or it's just that we just don't have her skill. It's part of the tragedy of losing people you love is just the, is little things like that that you don't think about until, you know, like my sister makes a really good kuggle but it's not like my grandmother and it's, you know, coleslaw that other family members make is good but like you'll never have Bubbies and so it's, you know, it's little things like that that are the things about her that should be remembered as much as everything that happened to her in the war. She, yeah, I mean, I think, and I think that this is her dancing at my brother's wedding. She loved to dance. She loved to laugh. She loved to make fun of people. Sometimes nicely, sometimes not so nicely. And this is the, that's in Ansbach when my grandparents first met and that is at my sister's wedding. So probably like 60 years later, they were married for almost 75 years, I think. He, she died in March of 2018 and then he died in July of 2018 as well. So followed right after her and to the end were, you know, spent every single day together and continued to bicker as though they were newlyweds, I guess they never really outgrew that. She, and in her later years when she was struggling with dementia, there would still be these like bursts of Bubbies that would come through when she would fight back because my, we call him Papa. Papa would do something stupid or he was criticizing me for, I was doing some, I was doing like an advocacy work and I leaned more liberal and he was more conservative and he was kind of ragging on me and my grandmother who had just been sitting there silently was like, sit, leave her alone. Like she's trying to do good and she would just like, she would just kind of like spring out as herself and it really was, she was a really remarkable woman for, you know, her survival during the war and for everything that she continued on to be for us. So I'm just gonna wrap, every year on Passover, my family reads the letter that my, that Salah received from my aunt Rizal after liberation when they first discovered that they were, that they had survived. So my grandmother found her on a list and sent her a letter saying, you know, I'm still alive, I can't believe we survived. I mean, I'm sure there were other parts written but that was the gist and this is the letter that was returned. So, okay, so Carlstad, this is the letter. Carlstad, December 6th, 1945. Dearest newly found little sister. My hands are trembling, I'm jumping around going crazy, I am delirious, I don't know where to begin. So my intuition concerning you was correct after all and you are alive for us. My mind is frantic, confused. December 6th will be a memorable festive one for us. For today, I received a letter from you, my dearest one. I can't believe my eyes, it happened just as I was feeling abandoned and resigned. I did not doubt that you were alive but that you who knows how to manage in life would not send any news about yourself. There's the guilt. Why does she let us hear from her? I thought to myself, forgive me for writing so haphazardly. Oh God, what goes on in my mind now. Well my dear, I read your letter 10 times. My tears covered up your words so others had to help me read them. I sent your cherished letter to Blima, who is our other sister, immediately as we are not together but she visits me from time to time. By sheer coincidence, we were able to learn of our great joy that you exist. Itka, the noble soul that she is, rushed the good news to us immediately. May nothing ever harm her in life to compensate her for this good deed. Dearest one, as I write, I am already anxious to know when our first letter will reach you. I'm happy that you are well and that you did not wander around. Is an example of how my grandmother must not have shared all of the details. We, on the other hand, live through a great deal but in spite of everything, we survive somehow. Now I have to double my effort to get well quickly so that when I am healthy and strong, I can see you looking well too. Finally, after all of our suffering and horrible ordeal, after six years of horror and separation, we should be able to hug you tight close to our heart. Salah, I do not wish to and will not write to you about our experiences because no matter how much I write, it would not measure up to the reality of it all. I wanna talk to you face-to-face about everything. When will that be, Salah? Speed it up as much as you can, don't delay. I'm doing the same. May God help us achieve our great goal. Do not worry about us, the worst is over. Oh, how my mind agitates and how it does not let me rest as I wonder whether God forbid you are hungry. How can we get you over here? And why did you leave Bergen-Belsen? Please remember to write about everything for it will be our only consolation. Even when we had no news about you, I kept staring at the door as if I knew for certain that you are here. What is there to say now that we know we really have you? Every minute is going to be an eternity. We keep on talking about you all the time. To try to find you, I wrote to Czechoslovakia, to Sosnovia, to Stockholm, and to Warsaw, hoping your name was listed somewhere all to no avail. My heart pained that there was no trace of you and here you appeared again on Earth's surface, hold to it fast so that you could recapture at least a bit of your lost young life. And now, Sala, I will not write any more now and will end by taking leave of you, dearest, and kiss you 1,000 times, your sister, who longs from the depth of her heart to see you and to embrace you. These are also Blima's wishes. I do not want to put off my writing, that's why I'm doing it right away. I'm waiting for an answer to hear what Blima has to say about our good luck. We shall never again lose contact with each other, never. We send you loads of kisses and await anxiously further news about you, Sala. I am distracted just now, so I will send you pictures next time. I can hardly wait for an answer from you. I wrote this letter on regular paper at first, but I had to rewrite it so it could travel faster and that's why the writing is so compressed. Goodbye, Sala, live. And that's my favorite picture of my grandmother riding a horse. And yeah, so I'm happy to, whoa. I'm happy to take any questions if anyone has any. Yeah, so Blima, who was the, so my grandmother had 10 siblings and all of them died with the exception of my grandmother and Blima and Rizal. Blima died like in 1952, I think, so right after, close after liberation, she had a heart condition. And Rizal died in the 90s, I think. I don't remember the exact date, but their relationship was close, but Rizal, or Rose, we call her Rose, was very, very religious in a way that my grandmother wasn't, I mean my grandmother and grandfather were Orthodox Jews, but Rizal was on a different level and that created a barrier in certain ways, both with my mom and with us as kids and a little bit between them in terms of kind of their ability to communicate, but they were very close until the end. Where? Oh, where? No. Well, I wanna say it was when they got to the US because my grandmother went straight from Ansbach, I believe, to Paris to take the boat to the US and then Rizal came over a few years later, but I could be wrong about that. That's the kind of question that my mom could answer off the top of my head that I can't know. It's fine. Yeah, well what's interesting is after my grandmother, my grandparents, when they got older, they moved out of their house in Muncie and they moved in with my parents for several years and when they sold their house, I went up there with my dad to kind of, and to clean stuff out and then went back with my mom as we continued to clean things and my parent and my grandparents were both kind of quarters and I had, which turns out was good, my grandfather had told me that he had like cool life magazines in the attic and so I asked, actually I didn't do this because I was afraid of spiders, but I asked the person who was helping us move to go into the attic and bring down what was down there. There's a video this summer, but he brought down these massive piles of paper and I was looking through them and in the piles of the magazines, I found more letters and this was maybe like two or three years ago and I freaked out because I was like, oh, I recognize Rizal's handwriting, like I knew the paper, I knew what I had found and what I had uncovered was the sequence of communications post-war, which we hadn't had, so the letters in the box were the letters from the camps. These were the letters after the one that I just read to you, actually, one of them's now, I brought it along with me, it's in the exhibit hall now, so it continued the story of their communications. So we have that to a certain degree, but I don't know exactly when they physically reunited. Yeah. Mm-hmm. We, there's a group of us right here who are continuing your legacy. We have just recently produced for the libraries and will continue to get onto some schools, probably. Amazing. For the legacy to sell. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay, I just want to say, I'm not as obnoxious as I seem in that play. Okay, semblance is uncanny. Yeah, it's funny because the play, that's so nice to hear. My mom will be so delighted by that. We have a running family chain about this experience, I'll be sure to mention it, but that there's a play about this story, the, it's about the, when the letters had been found, we had a bit of a family tiff about where the letters should end up. My sister and I felt very strongly that we should, that they were family artifacts and that we should keep at least some of them. My mom viewed them as historical documents, all of which should be given away. A lot of angry words were exchanged. There's actually an email that I wrote to my mom because I was away at college that is verbatim used in the play. And we basically threatened to disown her. And then she went to the lot and because the near public library had told her that they wanted all of the letters and none of them. And so I said, and so I sent this email and my sister was home. So they yelled at each other in person. And the day that my mom went to the library, she sent us an email that just said, I walked out of the library and out of the deal. I don't know what happens next, but you got what you wanted for now. She was not happy about it. But eventually we struck the deal where each of us got to keep one letter. So there are, I think like probably 10 letters in our possession and not including the ones that I found afterwards. Cause I was like, you're not going anywhere near these. I was like, these are ours forever. And the rest of them are at the library. But that's so wonderful. It is, it's really a great play. And we get, I frequently get emails from people, from young girls who are putting it over, being like, can you tell me about your story? Like, can you tell me about different things? At one point one of them was like, can we talk about your motivation? And I was like, I don't know what I'm talking about. I was like, I was 20 years old and mad at my mom. So yeah, it's, but it's, that's lovely to hear. I'm really glad that you're able to continue doing that. Oh, nice. You need more Coke bottle glasses, but yeah. I do have a question. She played Bubby. Bubby? Oh, nice. You have the same haircut. I know over here, she was so mean. My question is, I started reading your mother's book the last night and I, the first few pages I discovered that those who were in the camps were not tattooed. And there was a conflict between those who were tattooed and those who weren't tattooed. And I didn't know that. Did she ever talk, your grandmother ever talk about that issue? No, because it, because, I mean, she wasn't, she didn't have a tattoo. And it's just not the kind of thing that really came up in conversation but what I did always find interesting was she would have these, she stayed close with a couple of survivors, some of whom she knew when she was in the camps and some who she had met later in life and that just turned out to be something they had in common. And it was always including one who, an example that, because you mentioned the number, she had numbers on her arm, she had been in Auschwitz and she, I remember hearing them talk for the first time and my grandmother saying she had been or someone was saying they had been in the camp for two years and the woman who had been in Auschwitz was like, oh, like my father was so rich he sent me to camp for five years. It was much more impressive. And I was like, what? And it was just this example of finding humor and kind of the darkest thing possible that I always found really interesting which does not answer your question at all but you mentioned the numbers and that's the first thing that came to mind. Is that the one on the left? Yeah, sure. So Allah who, for those who don't know is that woman, is the one on the left. So when my grandmother first went to the camps she, the diary that I was reading when she had first shown up, a woman, she was, her mother was crying as they said goodbye and this like kind of glamorous woman walked up and was like, don't worry, I'll take care of her. And my great grandmother, so Bubby's mom had, didn't know who this woman was but latched on to the idea that this older woman would take care of her and true to her word Allah did. And she, so the woman with Allah Gertner and she is all over the letters and all over the diary and just did an amazing job of keeping my grandmother safe of making sure that she had food when she needed food and that she, they shared a bunk when they first got to the camps she and it talks about how at one point they moved and they were put in separate barracks and my grandmother is so devastated that she can't share a bunk with Allah anymore and then Allah like rearranges it so they can still share a bunk because it was just their way of staying together and Allah called her Sarenka. They had like, you know, they had this really amazing relationship and then ultimately, and my grandmother didn't really know what had happened to her and it wasn't until all this research came out that it turned out that Allah had been one of the four women who was hanged right before Auschwitz was liberated for blowing up the crematoria. And so she's this like actual historic, I mean, she's an actual historical figure who's like written about in books and she just happens to have been someone who befriended my grandmother one day at a train station which is pretty remarkable and she really, I mean, she took my grandmother under her wing because she saw that her mom was freaking out basically and she kept her alive in a lot of ways and so we, she's very special to the family but that picture, we just, we didn't know who it was until the letters came out and this picture was taken to keep everyone calm. They did send the Jews who had originally gone to the camps when that letter came home for like a vacation basically for a couple of weeks, which, I mean, they obviously didn't do later but at the time they did and this picture was taken on that vacation. Allah was like, let's take a picture together and my grandmother kept it and it was always framed in their house and yeah, it's the image that like most people have of my grandmother, understandably, so yeah. But Allah's, you know, she's, my little brother's, well, he's not so little, he's like 32 but my brother's middle name is Garner from Garner and Garnsash, mush together, so named for her. Oh, really? Rivka, yeah, Rivka Ladour participated in, Really? Dynamite, she was a secretary type, type of position and she took Dynamite and put it in her clothing or in her hat or whatever, wherever she could just a little bit at a time and helped and it must have been, I wonder if she knew Allah. I'll come see me at the museum tomorrow, I'll show you the video. Awesome, I will, yeah? I was in the play too, I was Haim Kauffman and Herbert Paca but I have a question, have you gone to see the town where your grandmother came from? So I haven't but in after, while my mom was writing the book, she took this like epic trip with my uncles and my grandparents to follow the path of everywhere that my grandmother had been. So they went to Sosnowiec and ended in Ansbach where my grandparents met, I've never been, I actually have never been to Poland but it's always, it's on my list but no, but my family's been there. Actually that trip and this goes back to kind of the Auschwitz comment before, one of the things that I talked about with my grandmother afterwards was, they said they went on that trip in probably like the mid 90s I think-ish and when she came home she said to me, my entire life, every time the doorbell rings for like a second, I think like what if it's, what if like my parents survived and they're here at the door, they found me. And it, yeah, and it wasn't until I went to, this is her talking, it wasn't until I went to Auschwitz and saw it that I knew they couldn't have made it out of their life and so it really, that trip which was such a powerful thing for the family to go back and see that also had a lot of, I feel like closure for her as well. But yeah, but when, but just recently somebody sent, and this just clicked for me, somebody who's a researcher in the town sent my mom a roll call from a school that has Rizal's name on it, like someone had just randomly uncovered like the role from whatever school they had gone to in like grammar school. So there's constantly, constantly ties to that town, but now I haven't been. Got questions? Awesome. Thanks so much Carolyn for so generously sharing your story and the exhibit and really sort of being at the heart of our program this year which really the whole focus was women in the Holocaust but I think we always find that focusing on one person and one story is really the way to understand this event that really you can't comprehend in its magnitude. So thanks again and thanks for your remarks and so generously answering people's questions and we really do appreciate that. So we're, again I just really wanna thank all of you for being here this evening. Nobody came to hear me so I'm not gonna give a long talk at the end but just to remind you that we will be, I'm having a program again next year. Certainly I know the staff at the museum and the library staff are happy to hear from you if you have ideas for themes or programs. We're happy to hear from you about that. If you haven't been to the exhibit in the gallery I hope you will go and it looks like there's also still a little food left. So thanks again for coming and we're really glad that you did come tonight.