I Want You To Know We’re Still Here, A Post-Holocaust Memoir, Ether Safran Foer, author

This is the poignant story of Esther Foer’s search for the truth about her parent’s history. Late in life, she learned that her father had once had another wife and child. She knew nothing about them, and her mother was not forthcoming with any information. Many Holocaust survivors refused to discuss, or rarely discussed, their previous lives. They preferred to move on and to forget the horror and unspeakable losses of that time which kept their children in the dark about what they had to suffer through in order to survive. Often, there was another whole side to a parent that they never would have dreamed possible.

In her search for the truth about her family and what happened to those murdered by Hitler, she learns that her father was briefly hidden by a Christian family. Now her search extended to finding them too, if possible. She thought they belonged in the special category of Righteous Gentiles, honored by Jews for risking their own lives to save them. She was determined that they be added to the list. Her search took her back to Europe and Trochenbrod, part of Ukraine where massacres of whole families of Jews occurred and where her father had lived. The Jewish people in that area were rounded up and forced to strip and then lie down in pits that had been dug. They were then mercilessly gunned down. Layer upon layer of people followed. The dirt that covered them was described as moving for days after, since some did not die immediately. So much for the anti-Semites who said they never knew what was going on, they sure did. Yes, many were too frightened to intercede, but early on, they acquiesced and opened the door for Hitler’s minions to enter and murder innocent people.

Although many of Esther’s efforts were thwarted by a lack of records and dim memories or missing witnesses who either died or left no discernible way to find them, she did uncover many secrets and learned a great deal about her background. She knew influential people, she had had high-powered jobs, her sons were authors, one even wrote a fictional account about her ancestor’s home town, and this enabled her to get more and more information. When she returned to what she thought was her father’s home “town”, she was welcomed and treated royally by the surviving townspeople and their families. They were eager to help her garner information and to show her the memorial sites. There were no Jews left there, however. Hitler had indeed made it judenrein.

To make sure that those who were murdered were not forgotten, she visited the sites where her relatives either once lived or where they were murdered, whenever possible, to mark their existence and to honor them, to let them know that someone remembered them and would go on remembering them afterwards. She left a family photo there, buried or in a crack somewhere at a memorial, to commemorate their lives and remind the world and the victims that they were not forgotten.

The past existed only in remnants, for Esther, but she was able to piece it together to find some satisfaction and put many of her questions to rest. Most of her relatives either died during the Holocaust or died afterwards, she herself was in her seventh decade of live when she embarked on this project. This is the story of her search for answers and her effort to keep the memories of those who were unjustly sacrificed alive. This is the story of her closure as she remembered them with her prayers.