The Pages In Between:
Unearthing the Hidden Legacy of Two Families, One Home
Bernard Milken Jewish Community Campus
22622 Vanowen Street, West Hills, CA 91307
Sunday, November 2, 2008
2:00 PM
New York-based journalist Erin Einhorn's mother Irena was born in the Jewish
ghetto of Bedzin, Poland, in 1942. A year later, as Irena's parents were
being sent to concentration camps, her father made a deal with a Polish
woman to hide Irena in exchange for his property. Irena's mother died
at Auschwitz, but her father survived, and after the liberation met Irena
in Sweden to go to America.
As an adult, Einhorn decided to return to Poland to find her grandfather's house, hoping she might also meet the Polish woman who'd hidden her mother. As Einhorn worked on her family quest, she also explored the somewhat surreal world of modern Polish-Jewish relations -- from concentration camp tourism to faux-Jewish nightclubs featuring raucous renditions of Hava Nagila. When she eventually makes contact with the family who hid her mother, she thought she'd created a made-for-TV-reunion for two families thrown together by history. A man who knew her mother as a child threw his arms around her and -- tears streaming down his face -- told her the little girl had been a sister to him. But when Erin is asked to fulfill a decades-old promise involving the house that her family still owned, she must search through centuries of dusty records, maneuver an outdated, convoluted legal system, and prove the death of a great-grandfather born in 1868, to right the wrongs of the past.
Erin will show what she discovered in ghetto records, property and social
service agency archives and in troves of birth, marriage and death records
that had been harboring family secrets for decades. In a year spent living
in the country where her mother was born, she found the only known photo
of her grandmother and shocking news about how she may have died. She
learned that her mother's only memory of Poland was probably false. And she
discovered, as with most family stories, that memory is not always the same as truth.
Erin Einhorn is a reporter for the New
York Daily News where she's covered New York City's government
and the nation's largest public school system. She has written for the Philadelphia
Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News, and Fortune. A contributor to public radio's This
American Life, Einhorn's story was the basis
for one of the show's most popular episodes. She lives in New York City.
Program is free to JGSLA members and $5 for guests.