Juli Berwald: A Journey to Memorialize Holocaust Victims

Join us for a heartfelt conversation with Juli Berwald, an acclaimed ocean scientist, and author, along with her father Dr. David Berwald, mother Gail, and nephew Max Stein. Together, they share a poignant family journey rooted in the Holocaust, as depicted in a collection of letters discovered after the passing of Juli's grandmother. Dive into this moving exploration of history, resilience, and the power of familial connection.

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Walking through their camp and being with my family to do it was transformative. And I've come out of that feeling like, everybody should go to Auschwitz. Everyone in the whole world should walk through that camp, should through those gates, should should experience it and should should somehow internalize it in a way. This is not to forgive, but to understand. With your host, writer and scholar of genocide studies, Sabah Carrim. I am your co-host, Luis Gonzalez-Aponte. Not to forgive, but to understand. Not to forgive, but to understand. Juli Berwald is an ocean scientist and science writer based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the Science Memoir and ten science Textbooks. And her magazine length pieces have appeared in The New York Times and National Geographic, among other publications.

In 2007, a science memoir, Spineless: 0:55

The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone was published by Penguin Random House, and in 2022, her Life on the Rocks building a future for coral reefs was published by the same organization we are here today to speak with her, as well as a father David and mother Gail and her nephew Max on a very different subject, which we’ll begin with a reading of an excerpt from a diary. But before we do that, Juli would you like to tell us a little bit about this diary and about the genesis, about the reason why there was a compilation of this diary by your family? Yeah, I guess I would call it. It's more of a collection of letters than a diary. And my dad can talk about it in more detail. But basically my father's parents were the only ones of their family to survive the invasion of Poland and the subsequent Holocaust. And my dad grew up, he often says, without knowing much about his grandparents and but after his mother died, that's my grandmother in the bottom of the China cabinet. My dad discovered around 100 letters, and those letters had been written from my grandparents family to my grandparents. After my grandparents came here in 1938, the letters were written in multiple languages. they were in Russian. They were a lot were in Yiddish, a couple were in Italian. They were a lot of languages. And so it took a long time. And I think my dad can speak to this more to get them translated. But ultimately he did and compiled them into a book. And so the excerpt I want to read, which I haven't talked to my dad about yet, is from this from February 12th, 1941. It is the I think one of the big question marks my dad always had was whether or not his grandparents knew he had been born. And this letter was proof that they did know that my dad had arrived in the world. it goes Dear Israel. Israel was my grandfather's name, Dear Israel. Yesterday I got the happy news about your newborn son. I wish you a lot of happy moments and long years with your son. Finally, after such a long wait, I'm very happy. The only problem is I cannot see the child. It has been a long time since I got any information from you that can be explained by the fact that you forgot our address. But I hope this is not the case. How is Vanya doing? Vanya was my grandmother. Manya cannot write because her eyesight recently has been bad. Her eyes are watering all the time. Recently, Mamma is not feeling very well, but there is nothing we can do about it. Maybe it will get better in the future. Write to us more often. Margolis got some beautiful clothing. It was sent three months ago. I wish you a lot of help and health and happiness Minna and Minna was my grandfather's sister and my middle name is Minette. I was named after her, so she knew that my dad had been born. too. David. Would you like to tell us what you feel about this extract and what sort of emotions it stirred in you? Well, I yeah, I think that what I was looking for in the in the letters, which is sort of my mother was sort of a pack rat just like I was. I am. And we didn't know I knew that she had some letters because I had seen a scatter scattering of them over the years. But she had a drawer on that kind of cabinet that she threw birthday cards and stuff into. And so I'm going through birthday cards with every person they ever knew. And all of a sudden I start finding these letters. Some were folded up. Most of them were postcards. And as Juli said, we found those appreciable number. Plus I found a whole load of letters, about 40 that had been written by my mother to my father in 1938, the year that they came to the United States. And those were all in Polish. And the reason for those letters is that my father's uncle brought the two of them to the United States under his sponsorship in 1938. There was very few Jews that were allowed to come to the United States. I think the entire country had 20,000 immigrants, and that's it for the whole year of 38 and 39. But anyway, the dad's uncle had shipped my mother down to Houston with some other family. She had never experienced weather like they have in Houston with the humidity and the heat and so on. She came from a northern country and so most of these letters detailed things that she did with this Aunt Rachel, who lived in Houston and the rest of the Berwald. I never met them. They never took us down to Houston or Dallas. I've resurrected a lot of these friends since I started looking into his genealogy to sort of finish that little story. We had a pathologist at my hospital where I was a surgeon who was from Poland, and I brought the letters to him and we would come once a week and he would translate. And he I'll never forget he made a cute saying. He says, These are your parents, you know, personal thoughts. Are you sure you want me? I said, That's all I have. I have got to have it. So he and I would scribe and he would translate the letters for me. And there was one actually that Juli did was an Italian, because my father had some of his training in Italy, knew nine languages, and then the rest was a real problem because they were all written in script Yiddish. And it's not print Hebrew, it's looks like chicken scratch, But that's what they were written it and I couldn't find. Everybody would tell me, yes, I know Polish. I mean, I know Yiddish. But they didn't and they didn't know how to do a script. Yiddish did never translated any of these letters. So I ended up going through YIVO, which is the Yiddish preservation organization in New York, and they got me a translator and it was not cheap, but I really didn't care. And we got all the letters translated. So that's the genesis of the book. It's very interesting that you say that because in my study of memoir literature of the Holocaust, what I found out was that although many scholars see today that that period post-Holocaust was silent, there were no publications perceived from survivors. And there are other scholars who've come in to contradict that statement and say there were tons people wanted to write about the experiences, but unfortunately there was a problem of language. Basically, all of these memos were in Yiddish and therefore not accessible to the English speaking world. So it's interesting that Juli now David just mentioned that you translated that letters, that letter which was in Italian, the Italian parts of the book today. I'm curious. I mean, you're a writer. I'm a writer too. And I know that sometimes we do engage in some translation work, but if we are to translate a letter or something as precious as this letter that you were translating, I'm curious to know whether you experienced anything different. What were your thoughts during that translation process? Well, my grandma was pretty miserable, so like, I think my dad's like she didn't like the weather. And the the truth is the the family that wasn't her family. It was my grandfather's family. They were horrible. They were not nice to her. I mean, I think that can be an experience of immigrants. And so and she thought that they were kind of kooky, like their behaviors were. So they were. One there was one person in the family who was. I don't think he was really maybe a great person. And so she was stuck with these people who weren't treating her great. She was sort of not loving. And so it was I, I mean, my grandma, like my dad said, was a big personality, but it made me she was she was, you know, in her twenties, late twenties when that was happening to her. And it helped me kind of connect with her in a way. I mean, I could put myself in her position and sort of understand why she was writing. And it was very honest. She was very honest with my grandfather. I'll throw in here, yeah, that there's one letter in which she was she writes, We are always so friendly and good when we are apart like this. How come we argue when I come home? Well, that was that letter, Dad. That was the Italian, right? And it's funny because they did. They fought like they fought like crazy. And they they insulted each other in different languages because they spoke so many because they'd had to move all over Europe for my grandfather to come get his education because of the anti-Semitism. But, you know, there was true there was love between them even though they they they fought it was kind of part of the relationship. And I think that's one thing like one thing that persecution can do is it can reduce the humanity of people to the numbers and and and to the the the idea of being persecuted. But like these letters reveal personality, which is humanity. And that's like what I find so important about them. Now obviously our audience doesn't know about the contents of this book, this collection of letters. I'm curious to hear what marked the three or four of you, rather, in, you know, when you perused the collection, what were the bits that you would like to discuss in terms of the persecution that we were experiencing and how was it approached? You know, in those times. I think that I'm going to change one word that she used and that is persecution. I think it was this is what happened and that was the way they viewed it. They I, I keep getting a feeling that there was a lot more going on in the day to day living like they were in a ghetto and in Belarus called Słonim and the Słonim ghetto had 25,000 people in it. And as far as we know, that's where they died. There was no trains, there was nothing taking them to Auschwitz or Birkenau or any of that. They did mention that it was hard to get things, you know, and they were very specific about saying, send us that. And they would they wanted to try and get better things. My mother's family, I think, was more well-to-do than my father was family, although that's maybe not quite true, I'm not sure. But I know, for example, this is there's one or two examples of it just blow me away is the ghetto was destroyed by the Einsatzgruppen, which was the murder squads from. And yet we got a postcard that is dated June 22nd or third, and the Einsatzgruppen came in and started liquidating the ghetto. On June 27. We still got a postcard from and that's the last postcard we got. But how did that happen? How did normal everyday things happen? And, they, the two families, would get together every week and they would have dinner together or Shabbos together. And Juli mentioned the the thing where they they killed a chicken and had a big meal celebrating my birth. So that and Dan's father would write these letters like we've had a difficult time but we've come out the other end and things will get better now and he also statements that after the invasion in 39 that they ran away to a town which I've been through and it's only ten miles away, but it was on the other side of the border. And so the Russians took it over and they he said the Russians were pretty nice to them And and his brother, my dad's brother had a job as a I don't know what a clerk or something like that. Those are things that they tried to make it sound as if they were doing all right. But there's an undercurrent in the letters that it wasn't. All right. You know, my dad tried to send them wool blankets and and some cloth, and I can't remember now whether they ever got it or not. But they and I, I did not find any evidence like the joint distribution committee would transfer money, but I don't know that they ever got any packages from Dad. They would beg for these things in the letters, but they didn't get very much. Thank you. Thanks for sharing this, Max. I have a question for you. How has your great grandmother's collection of letters shaped your understanding of the Holocaust compared to what you've learned at university? Yeah, I mean, I, I do have a particular interest in this area of history. It's something that I feel is very much in my blood. It's part of my heritage. And I think reading some of the letters about the the ghettos and how my family actually lived that experience compared with reading other people's diaries, reading other memoirs from people in other ghettos gives me this sense of connection and this deeper understanding of what happened. And so I think these letters have really have really sparked an interest, not just academically, but also emotionally. For me, just because I have I have, you know, all of these people that went through this experience, unlike some of my other classmates. And so I really do feel like I have a very different view of all of these events because I have these letters, because I have these personal primary documents, if that's what we can call them. And I think it's really interesting that I can draw upon the experiences of my own family rather than someone else who, you know, has been published and might seem very far off and academic. Where it's this source is something that's very close to me and it's very much a part of me as a person. what is interesting is in my exploration of memoir literature, I noticed a certain pattern in the way in the themes that are explored by, say, the survivors, the first generation survivors, the second generation survivors, the third generation, and so on and so forth. And what is interesting is that the themes that are discussed by all of these generations, of course, are different. So they are very relevant. Two to even Max. I mean, Max, you just spoke about, you know, how the Holocaust is very far away in the past, but you still feel a connect. And as we know, we speak very often about intergenerational trauma. We speak about half trauma passed down through generations. And, of course, you know, the memory of the Holocaust is also important. So even in the context of you being a third generation survivor, there is a whole drawer and there's a whole panoply of literature of books and memoirs out there on the stories or the accounts told by third generation survivors that the themes of course, change the change through time. You know, the interests are different. So I have a question to ask you. Do you see any lessons in your great grandmother's collection that feel relevant to today's world or your own life? I mean, I, I think the biggest takeaway is the amount of hope that my family had even when they were in the ghetto. When you read the letters, there's just this this sense of like we have people in America, we have people who are going to survive and get through this and carry on the family and I think that's really important. I've been reading a lot of of memoirs from this time, and I think there's I see a big difference between optimism and hope, where optimism you're looking at the what's going on around you and hope is looking towards the future. And I think my family in Poland had a whole lot of hope that my great grandparents were going to rebuild the family, and that's exactly what they did. And so me as a third generation survivor, and I'm a product of that hope and and of that rebuilding that happened, my great grandparents came to America and it was just them. And there's a great quote. It's it's from the two of us came to this big family and. I'm very much a part of that. And I think me and all of my cousins feel the same way. We have that same connection to the family, which is that hope of our of our relatives who were lost in the Holocaust. Thank you. Thank you, Max. Juli do have you come across other instances where you you where other families have engaged in the same act of compiling the letters or sort of like any memories. Yeah, it's very strange. I don't know if it's very strange, but my very my very best friend, who I grew up with in St Louis, when her grandmother died, her mother found a shoebox full of letters. Also, there were even more. There's probably 100 in our collection, and they probably have almost 250. And her family wasn't from Poland, they were from Germany. And they had them translated and it was this of a very strangely similar experience that we were learning about our great grandparents and their families, their stories of of World War Two at the same time, and trying to put together these people who we didn't know but whose stories were very emotional in these letters. But also, like my dad said, there's there seems to be some holding back like they were they were almost censoring themselves, I think, a little bit in the letters. Anyway, So my best friend also had this from growing up, had the same experience of finding out about her family and and the few survivors who who made it here had these letters from the people who didn't make it. I am just thinking about, you know, we all knew when we produce any tapes, we tend to censor ourselves. We get a lot of what we've written because we we feel that suddenly certain things should not be mentioned. And I'm just curious, because we've spoken a lot about what was going on in the background and how that was sort of like disguised. And there was a certain, you know, different there was a different image being portrayed, of course. I think one thing is that at least in our letters and I think I know who she's talking about. Yeah, they always, they say we are fine, everything is good. We have a place to live, we have enough food and I don't know that that's really true because, you know, they had no jobs. They had nothing to pay for anything with. And how could that be? There are some unexplained things that like there's some references in the letters in my mother's family where my grandfather, my mother's father went back and forth between Łomża and the ghetto and I don't know how he did that. There's one where the my grandmother, Rose, says, your grandma or your father will be back for Shabbos this weekend. How did he do that? Did he bribe people? They had a business that was a very good business and in the town of Łomża But I don't know. There's there's no way. Everything was always. Fine. So have you tried to has anyone even Max? I mean, that would be a very interesting area of research. You know, Have you tried to find out, for instance, the historical facts of those times about that particular area and any sort of accounts about what was really going on that you could then compliment with all the letters that you found? And of course, as I said, what was not been mentioned the unsaid in these letters. I think I can give you two stories. The first one is a thing called the ghetto bench, and it was the inciting cause of my father and mother to come to the United States. My father couldn't get his license to practice medicine because of being Jewish, and he decided to go to Vilna, to the university. There called Stefan Batory at the University of Vilna that still exists. And I have his student card. They saved everything, which is I have a little treasure trove of these things. And his reference to me was“I went to Vilna, to the university to get training and maybe become a teacher or professor. But when I got there, I saw Jews being beaten on the steps of the university” and I can date that there was a riot January 27th, I think over a thing called ghetto benches where they tried to make benches in the back or any Jew, any Gypsy, a Jehovah's Witness, anybody that they didn't like, they would make them sit on those benches and they weren't allowed to participate in class. They could listen, but they could not participate. And then they tried to expel all of the Jews. And the president of the university in Vilna refused to do it. And the students rioted and there was the Pogrom And that was sort of the inciting cause. My father never told me that story. He told me that when I saw Jews being beaten on the steps of the school where people should be educated, I decided that was it. I'm not going to stay. there's one question, of course. I mean, this is probably a what made Juli and I start like I think the time when I came to see you, Julie, at home last December. We spoke about that, I think, in detail. And that's very crucial to our program today, which is you all went on a trip to Poland please tell me your experience, because I I sensed very different emotions throughout in terms of what I watched of that trip on the view that you sent to me. And I also heard one or two of the audio recordings that you recorded when you were there. So, yes, I would like to know that one of the things I wanted to do as carrying forward the the memorial, or if you want to use that word of my parents and our family was that I wanted everybody in the family to know what they had gone through because I was the only one that was collecting it. this was sort of a knowledge trip that we wanted, our trip that I wanted our family and our children to have. And so I said, I don't care what it costs, I'm going to take everybody that wants to go. and I think it was very worthwhile because of the things that happened on the tour. there were a number of incidents on the trip and if anybody wants to add, please to Juli and Max is when we got to Poland, we met the young lady who was going to be our guide, and they had a van us. And I think it was one of the best trips I ever took in terms of accomplishing what you wanted to. And there were several things that just blew us away. And I think you've seen one of them as when we came Raczki and to show you how the interpretation of things is different. When we got Raczki, we got off the bus and there was a guide and another man who was a town historian, and they met us there and he said, and I brought some memorabilia and some pictures of the town and saw that my parents had brought. And the guy comes up to me and he says, Welcome to Raczki, and it's in the Suwałki District and so on and so forth. And have you seen, your father's factory. And I said, What are you talking about? They had a. farm. And the farm they lost the farm after, World War One, and moved into town. Well, I didn't know because my father never mentioned it, that his father, my grandfather, he and another family member and a friend and his best friend all had started a cloth factory and the building still existed in Raczki was the cultural center. They had a dance studio and they had computers. It's like, I guess it's it was like I was otherworldly and I never knew any of these things. My father told me we sold cloth. That was all he told then that the culmination of after we toured the town, we saw where the synagogue had been had been destroyed by the Nazis and where the cemetery had been. There was maybe one or two headstones left and the kids were very interested in that. And then we came back and we had this Silberstein installation. It's one of the few that are in Poland, and there's little brass plaques that are installed in front of the house where the person who was killed in the where they lived and the artist comes in and stalls and afterwards the entire town dances. Hora with us, I don't know if you know, it's Hebrew dance and so on and so forth. And it was just like, What is this going on? This is absolutely I could not understand it. It was like I did it. And to this day it's like, how did this happen? Well, the town was supportive of someone coming back. It's a little farm town. And they were there. There were 30 people dancing with. And so those are some of the things that we took. And then many other things like the visit to Auschwitz was really something my mother's home town was a larger town. So we her house was destroyed and her family business was destroyed. But they took us to the exact spot where the house was So we installed some stones there to and the town welcomed us. We went to the cemetery and so on. This was all way beyond what I thought we could accomplish. I think all the children, they remember this now. And, you know, you look through the book of our trip and all the pictures and it gives a little bit of depth to our family. And that's what I wanted to accomplish. I would love to hear from Juli from from Max, you know, about your experience as well, because I think you've all had different experiences of that trip. And that's a very big sort of like in terms of just Holocaust studies, genocide studies in general. I think we very often emphasize the importance of memorializing, right? So this was an act of memorializing Of what would ever happen in the family. And I think it's also, you know, the act of that act itself has very many benefits to the whole family. And I want you to speak about that In your experience, if it's possible. I'll say this I was nervous about going on the trip. I the Holocaust and. The stories have always been something that I have not embraced and I felt very nervous about. I did not want to go to Auschwitz either, like my Mom said, but my grandparents were so dear to me and I love talking to them about their childhood. The old I loved, I loved when they spoke in different languages. I loved my grandfather telling Bible stories. We would sleep over at their house on Friday when I was younger. Every Friday night we'd have Shabbat dinner with them and then I would sleep over and hearing the stories from their past was something I loved dearly. And so I wanted to go on the trip more to find those connections, then to connect with the scarier parts of their story, which were the yeah, the genocide part. And and I really even made a huge excuse not to go to Auschwitz, which was part of our trip, because I, I thought my daughter was too young and I didn't think she should go. But my daughter said, no, I can handle it. And so then I did have an excuse and I had to go. And I will say that walking through their camp and being with my family to do it was transformative. And I've come out of that feeling like, everybody should go to Auschwitz. Everyone in the whole world should walk through that camp, should through those gates, should should experience it and should should somehow internalize it in a way. And there was something about the reality of it that was more powerful than that, the imagination of it in a way that made me able to handle it. So I don't know if that makes any sense because it was horrible. But and, and I think it's really important. It was an important part of that trip that the end of the Auschwitz there's a room where there's a book that's six feet long. Maybe it takes up the whole room. I don't know if you've been there, but it's the names of everybody who was killed in the Holocaust. And so you can alphabetically go through it and you can. We found the page of the Berwalds. And seeing those names, I don't know why, but like it was something made me I was it made it real in a way that was really important. It's been important to me in my internalization of what happened to our family. I don't want to say it was healing, but there was something memorializing about it that made it powerful. That was one thing. Also, the going back to the Villages was amazing. I remember my grandma made all these pies all the time out of fruit and that village was literally in fruit. Fruit was falling off the trees. There were apples everywhere. Things. Yeah, peaches. I don't know. There was fruit all over that town. And I'm like, well, no wonder she baked with fruit all the time. And, and I and then we are seeing this the stones in the forest, the cemetery stones, and kind of noticing that the trees were 70 years old around the stones really felt like also an important thing to to witness. And then the dancing was I don't think any of us will ever forget that feeling of just holding hands with the people in this village and and dancing with them. And there was something someone said to me and one of the story and said, and my dad doesn't remember this, but a lot of historians said that it's possible that there were Berwalds in this village Raczki for 400 years. And to have. I. I, I can't because we are in this country for such a short time to think we were in somewhere else for such a long time made me feel connected to this planet. I guess in a longer, a more and an older way than I had felt before. I had gone to Poland. So it's those are sort of some of the top, top moments of that trip. Thank you. Thank you, Judy. Next Yeah, So I think my generation had a very different take on it, just because we don't have that connection to to to the to the great grandparents, to the people who actually lived there just because of our age. And I mean, I was 16 when we went. I didn't have that creative abyss of what actually happened. But the context about a lot of the things that I'm aware of now. But I really I think the biggest takeaway for me is what you call the third generation survivor, is that I was there with my family and my I was just looking through my roll and I have these videos of my of my grandfather, David, talking, giving me a tour of the village. And I think if if I lost like my entire camera roll, but that's it, I would be happy because it just shows how important it is that I have this connection between me, my parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents. And maybe 400 years before that's connected to this place that I don't even I didn't even know existed before we went there. And I just think being able to go there with my family was the most powerful part of this trip. I don't want to say that we were reclaiming the space because I don't think we were there to reclaim. We were there to memorialize. We were there to say, you know, look at what was lost, look at what has grown from that loss. And we were able to go back and really and really just cherish our lives as a whole. And I got a whole new appreciation for for just the the how our family works together and and how close we are. And I'm going back to Poland in May for part of this program I'm doing this semester, and I think it's going to be a very, very different experience in this one because not going with my family, I'm going with a more academic bend So it'll be interesting to go is I'm the only Jew in this program too. So that also gives me a different perspective. But I do think going as our family as to who we are today is that that was really powerful. It was definitely the most moving part of the trip. A general question. How do you feel about sharing this collection of letters that you have all compiled with a wider audience, potentially potentially impacting how others Holocaust history? I would love for that to happen, but I don't know how to make it happen. I, Juli and Lynn, Max's mother, essentially helped me to put this together. I will say that at the present time, still, I can't. The Holocaust Museum in Washington wants this stuff that I have. I have their green cards. I have the my dad's student cards, ID cards from France, Switzerland and Italy. And and and the one from Vilna that I mentioned before. And I have all these pictures which I've shared with the Holocaust Museum and Saint Louis, but the one in Washington that wanted me to donate the whole thing. And I can't do that. Juli's friends and they're good friends of mine because I went to high school with the with the mother's husband. He and I went to high school together, but in any case, they donated their whole trove of letters. But this is all I have. I have more. We have no souvenirs. We have no nothing other than these papers. And maybe a few and little items, one of which I did donate. And it was a wicker basket that mother brought her Trousseau to the United States. And I donated that to the Saint Louis Holocaust Museum. And so that's where we're at on this. And but I would be more than happy to publish the book more formally. I say there's a few little things that we could, but we basically put it together with the letter on one page and the translation on the next. And it takes time. It takes a lot of time and effort, but I'm willing to do it. Thank you. Max. Do you have such, such a plan? Do you have a plan to do something with this collection? I mean, the question that we always ask is, is historians and people considering these primary documents just like what makes them stand out, what makes them special? And I mean, I think coupling these documents with our trip and the intergenerational impact of these documents and the subsequent trip is what makes this makes everything special, in my opinion. I mean, as a student, I would love to do something with these documents. I would love to sort of reconstruct it in a way that I could pull out a couple of themes, a couple takeaways. But I do think that looking at these documents, a correspondence between people who were in a ghetto and people who were living comfortably in America is is is powerful for people learning about the Holocaust because it shows a whole new dimension. You read a lot about people who are physically in the Holocaust, but I don't think there's a whole lot about people who have escaped but still have family that are in Europe. And they're also getting this second hand information, maybe even guilt from like a survivor's guilt of what's happening. And I think the survivor's guilt was a big thing in our family. My grandfather talks a lot about silence around these letters, not translating them. And I think that's a big psychological aspect. But I just think that these these documents to highlight this a whole a whole different side of the Holocaust that people don't really talk about, which is like the splitting of families. And it does it at least for for me, it makes me more appreciative of the reason that I'm here today and how lucky I am I think what is interesting is how, Max, you seem to be basically highlighting all the main points in this process of figuring out how to work, for instance, towards, as I said, memorializing this collection letters. And you are right to say that I was reading a paper by the what is it called? It's called the Montreal anything. It's called the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. MIGS. And they published a paper on unpublished Holocaust memoirs. And this book is about the fact that, you know, the analyzed in the a few of the Holocaust memoirs where it were analyzed, those that were unpublished, as I said, it range from like 10 to 15 pages to a whole book. And of course, we would be curious to know why they were not published. And of course, one of the reasons one of the reasons given was that, you know, these these memoirs were not publication worthy because they didn't conform to certain rules, which Juli you know very well. Every publishing industry has its own rules. In fact, we also knew that some of the canonical writers such as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, actually even their works were rejected when they were sent for publication, including Otto Frank, who's the father of and Frank. All the works were actually rejected by the publishers because they just didn't appeal to the to the demand to demand out there. And, you know that the publishing industry is very much fake to the demands of writers and the themes that they want to read at that particular time. So I think Max just listening to you. Sort of makes me realize how you're very aware of the demands of the industry and you're aware that you have to conform to some of their demands for your work to be there and for it to be published. And you're very right. I think you have been able to highlight even the the crucial, distinctive factor about this collection, which is it's an account telling the experience of those who've managed to escape. And you rightly pointed out that word, you know, which is luck, right? Lucky You know, you feel lucky because a lot of the survivors who write about their experiences, those who escaped that possibility, they speak about where they ask themselves this question, how did I get to where and not the person next to me? And sometimes that selection or that attraction based on just simple luck, someone had had the mind to walk away, to get up, to just do the right thing and get away from a tragic experience. So yes, it was a big word. I wanted to I wanted to add two things. One, just about what you were just talking about in this Survivor first generation survivor group that I've been going to. The meetings there was we were each telling our stories and we just a little blurbs from it. And this one guy got up and said that his family had survived because when his mother and father were in line for the train, some man walked up behind his father and said don't get on the train, get on the truck. That's all he said. And the man that took that got on the truck went to a slave labor camp, escape from there. And the family survived. And then I wanted to add one last thing. This is from my father to you and to. Our. Family, because I've that so many times is that I once was just chatting with him and he said, you know, I really don't regret any of the things I did in my life. I regret the things I didn't do. And that was the way I felt about this trip. Everybody said, Why are you taking everybody? I said, Because I want to. It's the right thing to do and I want to do it. And so that I'll leave that with you. Thank you. Thank you so much. This was not to forgive, but to understand with our guests, Julie Berwald and family to our listeners. Don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. This is not to forgive, but to understand. With your host, writer and scholar of genocide studies, Sabah Carrim. I'm your co-host, Luis Gonzalez. Aponte. This is not to forgive, but to understand with your host, writer and scholar of genocide studies, Saba Karim. I'm your co-host, Luis Gonzalez Aponte. walking through their camp and being with my family to do it was transformative. And I've come out of that feeling like, everybody should go to Auschwitz. Everyone in the whole world should walk through that camp, should through those gates, should should experience it and should should somehow internalize it in a way. This is not to forgive, but to understand. A podcast series discussing genocide studies with. Experts and those connected to its critical questions. Not to forgive, but to understand. Not to forgive, but to understand. This was not to forgive, but to understand with our guests, Julie Berwald and family to our listeners. Don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. Check, check, check. Take one. This was not to forgive, but to understand. With our guest, Julie Berthold and family take to this was not to forgive, but to understand with our guests, Julie Berthold and family to our listeners. Don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussion. This is not to forgive, but to understand with our guests Julie Berthold and family. To our listeners, don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. This was not to forgive, but to understand with our guests Julie Burwell and family to our listeners. Don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. This is not to forgive, but to understand with our guest. This was not to forgive, but to understand with our guests, Julie Burwell and family to our listeners. Don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. This was not to forgive, but to understand with our guests Julie Berthold and family to our listeners. Don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. This was not. This is the second form. This was not to forgive, but to understand with our guests, Julie Burwell, her father, David, mother, Gail and nephew Max. To our listeners, don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. This was not to forgive, but to understand with our guests Julie Burwell, her father, David mother, Gail and nephew Max. To our listeners, don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. This was not to forgive, but to understand with our guests Julie Wald, her father, David, and mother Gail and nephew Max. To our listeners, don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. Last, this was not to forgive, but to understand with our guests, Julie Bishop. This was not to forgive, but I think what struck me, because I watched that video a few times, is really that image of when you are putting the stones, and I still have that, which is very vivid. Do I have your permission to play that little excerpt of the video just which is credited at the end of the program. Something. Sure. Yeah. Sure didn't like to be there. I think it would be very nice to have that. You've a lot. Of. Same. So. Okay. It's not there. Yeah, this was there. And this was what the store looked like. It's weird. I just. My father would say there was an upstairs. I think that was connected. okay. This was the living room. So it was. A kitchenette here. Okay. I look at this. And I saw this in 1988 that I came home and showed my father. He lived here? I showed him the pictures, and he said to me, all the steps are different. I said, No, no. You can see the steps were changed. Then he says, But there's a tree in front of the house. And I said, My father died in 50 years. Somebody planted a tree. That's the tree that's out there now. Yeah. So that was. And then he agreed this was, you know. Obsessed with travel. And this was the idea that we feel so. So he. Sees us and. He says, Is this. Just the first time that communities can seem to do. And just think this is pretty much a taboo and taboo subject? Thank you so much. Yeah, I hear you. Looks like. You. Look. I just see. More. People getting people to drink the photos. wow. Yeah. She's here with her young son Here. 16. This is about 1929. 20. Hall came to you, and this is my grandfather. And you can see all of my father's sisters here. And his brother. I think it's true. And this is. That is, you. Know, this is I mean, you know, this history of thing. That's this White House first cousin, you know, it was his relationship to help, you know, his dad's first cousin. So that would be his uncle. So not to miss California. They may start talking about what it all means to provide you what's going to go after this clip? It was clip yanked off a piece, our Vietnam article for something rather just from the get go, patriotic extraction. I go as Gonzo goes a historical and the announcement is like by the world to the what else you could have stopped. You feel that the CASA the double shell game the son of the atomic it says it's across to all holocaust. So what are we putting together like izakaya dinner special two bottles of radical accounts to scheme. I'll let you sort of got to that. So let us look like with this one was let me. So you go to the Islamic University stay Mr. Fox Israeli Cobra escort you spoke with, they come in a little bit of Mr. were the people of Israel about about that you go up okay you go to give an extra two things we were your congregation as poets like radicals Kabbalah because we don't like move near the street of the way we're talking about metaphors photographs like the vehicle in the British Thanksgiving NASCAR go problem is because we can to set that and though that's personal style of you are part of individual sort of gloomy skies of stereoscopic photo Benji push console and as that was a more the one of get you sooner or it means exposure thank you stories let's see I think the singles are it was a yes take me to take a little girl sarcomas consider to continue to teach you a lesson which makes there's a dog is two years ago to start with I think I think exploring our kids symposia because I respect Yiddish tradition obviously so much college a publicity image to show a shot of the couturier. It was go on the cutting board, you was pointing the Tosca policy. Everyone on Good said, I don't think you could put of it, but I was far more than to give him the feeling that conveys to that they particularly want I strategy to get losing money and musical importance, especially sports nationalism. Kind of a good part of it that we're going to need to invest. Let's go to go over showing our vinyl. So back to the donors zero eight. She is not welcome. I don't know what to say exactly, but I want to thank everybody here for coming to the ceremony today. It means a lot to me and to my family. That's and to my sister, to to. Yes, yes. On the the I just hope this is going to be physical. It's just contempt is it's just in that ceremony. And I just want to say on behalf of my father and his entire family that we hope that our coming here and showing you how wonderful his family has grown, his children, his grandchildren, his great grandchildren, that you will see us as a message of peace, good health and happiness to all of you who live here and enjoy the place where he came from. And that you will remember us in your hearts just as we will remember all of you in our hearts for this day. You talk about vegetables and fruits and I mean, not me. My wife. Is. So. Thank you, David. I want. To talk. And when we first learned about Christine while we were traveling in Berlin, we thought this would be such a meaningful way to memorialize and honor the Burwell family, most of whom we had never met. I began the process of inquiring about Silverstein, the Silberstein installation in September, not knowing if we would be successful throughout the entire process, Machine has been responsive, helpful, gracious and appreciative. We've enjoyed watching through your Facebook pages what is happening here in Rochester and especially your museum night and old photos. You've invited us to your city and made us feel welcome. We can't tell you enough how appreciative we are of everything that you have done for us. Thank. Juli Berwald is an ocean scientist and science writer based in Austin, Texas. She's the author of The Science Me More Intense. She is the author of the Science Memoir and ten science Textbooks. And her magazine length pieces have appeared in The New York Times and National Geographic, among other publications. The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone was published by Penguin Random House, and in 2022, her Life on the Rocks building a future for coral reefs was published by the same organization we are here today to speak with her, as well as a father David and mother Gail and her nephew Max on a very different subject, which we’ll begin with a reading of an excerpt from a diary. But before we do that, Juli would you like to tell us a little bit about this diary and about the genesis, about the reason why there was a compilation of this diary by the family by your family? Yeah, I guess I would call it. It's more of a collection of letters than a diary. And my dad can talk about it in more detail. But basically my father's grandparents, my father's parents were the only ones of their family to survive the invasion of Poland and the subsequent Holocaust. And my dad grew up, he often says, without knowing much about his grandparents and but after his mother died, that's my grandmother in the bottom of the China cabinet. My dad discovered around 100 letters, and those letters had been written from my grandparents family to my grandparents. After my grandparents came here in 1938, the letters were written in multiple languages. They were in German, sorry, not German, they were in Russian. They were a lot were in Yiddish, a couple were in Italian. They were a lot of languages. And so it took a long time. And I think my dad can speak to this more to get them translated. But ultimately he did and compiled them into a book. And so the excerpt I want to read, which I haven't talked to my dad about yet, is from this from February 12th, 1941. It is the I think one of the big question marks my dad always had was whether or not his grandparents knew he had been born. And this letter was proof that they did know that my dad had arrived in the world. So it goes Dear Israel. Israel was my grandfather's name, Dear Israel. Yesterday I got the happy news about your newborn son. I wish you a lot of happy moments and long years with your son. Finally, after such a long wait, I'm very happy. The only problem is I cannot see the child. It has been a long time since I got any information from you that can be explained by the fact that you forgot our address. But I hope this is not the case. How is Vanya doing? Vanya was my grandmother. Manya cannot write because her eyesight recently has been bad. Her eyes are watering all the time. Recently, Mamma is not feeling very well, but there is nothing we can do about it. Maybe it will get better in the future. Write to us more often. Margalit Margolis got some beautiful clothing. It was sent three months ago. I wish you a lot of help and health and happiness Minna and Minna was my grandfather's sister and my middle name is Minette. I was named after her, so she knew that my dad had been born. too. David. Would you like to tell us what you feel about this extract and what sort of emotions it stirred in you? Well, I yeah, I think that what I was looking for in the in the letters, which is sort of my mother was sort of a pack rat just like I was. I am. And we didn't know I knew that she had some letters because I had seen a scatter scattering of them over the years. But she had a drawer on that kind of cabinet that she threw birthday cards and stuff into. And so I'm going through birthday cards with every person they ever knew. And all of a sudden I start finding these letters. Some were folded up. Most of them were postcards. And as Juli said, we found those appreciable number. Plus I found a whole load of letters, about 40 that had been written by my mother to my father in 1938, the year that they came to the United States. And those were all in Polish. And the reason for those letters is that my father's uncle brought the two of them to the United States under his sponsorship in 1938. There was very few Jews that were allowed to come to the United States. I think the entire country had 20,000 immigrants, and that's it for the whole year of 38 and 39. But anyway, the dad's uncle had shipped my mother down to Houston with some other family. She had never experienced weather like they have in Houston with the humidity and the heat and so on. She came from a northern country and so most of these letters detailed things that she did with this Aunt Rachel, who lived in Houston and the rest of the Berwald. I never met them. They never took us down to Houston or Dallas. I've resurrected a lot of these friends since I started looking into his genealogy to sort of finish that little story. We had a pathologist at my hospital where I was a surgeon who was from Poland, and I brought the letters to him and we would come once a week and he would translate. And he I'll never forget he made a cute saying. He says, These are your parents, you know, personal thoughts. Are you sure you want me? I said, That's all I have. I have got to have it. So he and I would scribe and he would translate the letters for me. And there was one actually that Juli did was an Italian, because my father had some of his training in Italy, knew nine languages, and then the rest was a real problem because they were all written in script Yiddish. And it's not print Hebrew, it's looks like chicken scratch, But that's what they were written it and I couldn't find. Everybody would tell me, yes, I know Polish. I mean, I know Yiddish. But they didn't and they didn't know how to do a script. Yiddish did never translated any of these letters. So I ended up going through YIVO, which is the Yiddish preservation organization in New York, and they got me a translator and it was not cheap, but I really didn't care. And we got all the letters translated. So that's the genesis of the book. It's very interesting that you say that because in my study of memoir literature of the Holocaust, what I found out was that although many scholars see today that that period post-Holocaust was silent, there were no publications perceived from survivors. And there are other scholars who've come in to contradict that statement and say there were tons people wanted to write about the experiences, but unfortunately there was a problem of language. Basically, all of these memos were in Yiddish and therefore not accessible to the English speaking world. So it's interesting that Juli now David just mentioned that you translated that letters, that letter which was in Italian, the Italian parts of the book today. I'm curious. I mean, you're a writer. I'm a writer too. And I know that sometimes we do engage in some translation work, but if we are to translate a letter or something as precious as this letter that you were translating, I'm curious to know whether you experienced anything different. What were your thoughts during that translation process? Well, my grandma was pretty miserable, so like, I think my dad's like she didn't like the weather. And the the truth is the the family that wasn't her family. It was my grandfather's family. They were horrible. They were not nice to her. I mean, I think that can be an experience of immigrants. And so and she thought that they were kind of kooky, like their behaviors were. So they were. One there was one person in the family who was. I don't think he was really maybe a great person. And so she was stuck with these people who weren't treating her great. She was sort of not loving. And so it was I, I mean, my grandma, like my dad said, was a big personality, but it made me she was she was, you know, in her twenties, late twenties when that was happening to her. And it helped me kind of connect with her in a way. I mean, I could put myself in her position and sort of understand why she was writing. And it was very honest. She was very honest with my grandfather. I'll throw in here, yeah, that there's one letter in which she was she writes, We are always so friendly and good when we are apart like this. How come we argue when I come home? Well, that was that letter, Dad. That was the Italian, right? And it's funny because they did. They fought like they fought like crazy. And they they insulted each other in different languages because they spoke so many because they'd had to move all over Europe for my grandfather to come get his education because of the anti-Semitism. But, you know, there was true there was love between them even though they they they fought it was kind of part of the relationship. And I think that's one thing like one thing that persecution can do is it can reduce the humanity of people to the numbers and and and to the the the idea of being persecuted. But like these letters reveal personality, which is humanity. And that's like what I find so important about them. Now obviously our audience doesn't know about the contents of this book, this collection of letters. I'm curious to hear what marked the three or four of you, rather, in, you know, when you perused the collection, what were the bits that you would like to discuss in terms of the persecution that we were experiencing and how was it approached? You know, in those times. I think that I'm going to change one word that she used and that is persecution. I think it was this is what happened and that was the way they viewed it. They I, I keep getting a feeling that there was a lot more going on in the day to day living like they were in a ghetto and in Belarus called Słonim and the Słonim ghetto had 25,000 people in it. And as far as we know, that's where they died. There was no trains, there was nothing taking them to Auschwitz or Birkenau or any of that. They did mention that it was hard to get things, you know, and they were very specific about saying, do this or do that. Well, send us this or send us that. Yeah, send us that. And they would they wanted to try and get better things. My mother's family, I think, was more well-to-do than my father was family, although that's maybe not quite true, I'm not sure. But I know, for example, this is there's one or two examples of it just blow me away is the ghetto was destroyed by the Einsatzgruppen, which was the murder squads from. And yet we got a postcard that is dated June 22nd or third, and the Einsatzgruppen came in and started liquidating the ghetto. On June 27. We still got a postcard from and that's the last postcard we got. But how did that happen? How did normal everyday things happen? And, they, the two families, would get together every week and they would have dinner together or Shabbos together. And Juli mentioned the the thing where they they killed a chicken and had a big meal celebrating my birth. So that and Dan's father would write these letters like we've had a difficult time but we've come out the other end and things will get better now and he also statements that after the invasion in 39 that they ran away to a town which I've been through and it's only ten miles away, but it was on the other side of the border. And so the Russians took it over and they he said the Russians were pretty nice to them And and his brother, my dad's brother had a job as a I don't know what a clerk or something like that. Those are things that they tried to make it sound as if they were doing all right. But there's an undercurrent in the letters that it wasn't. All right. You know, my dad tried to send them wool blankets and and some cloth, and I can't remember now whether they ever got it or not. But they and I, I did not find any evidence like the joint distribution committee would transfer money, but I don't know that they ever got any packages from Dad. They would beg for these things in the letters, but they didn't get very much. Thank you. Thanks for sharing this, Max. I have a question for you. How has your great grandmother's collection of letters shaped your understanding of the Holocaust compared to what you've learned at university? Yeah, I mean, I, I do have a particular interest in this area of history. It's something that I feel is very much in my blood. It's part of my heritage. And I think reading some of the letters about the the ghettos and how my family actually lived that experience compared with reading other people's diaries, reading other memoirs from people in other ghettos gives me this sense of connection and this deeper understanding of what happened. And so I think these letters have really have really sparked an interest, not just academically, but also emotionally. For me, just because I have I have, you know, all of these people that went through this experience, unlike some of my other classmates. And so I really do feel like I have a very different view of all of these events because I have these letters, because I have these personal primary documents, if that's what we can call them. And I think it's really interesting that I can draw upon the experiences of my own family rather than someone else who, you know, has been published and might seem very far off and academic. Where it's this source is something that's very close to me and it's very much a part of me as a person. I think David spoke about discovering how when he went to the museum, the Holocaust Museum that you are referred to as a first generation survivor. And what is interesting is in my exploration of memoir literature, I noticed a certain pattern in the way in the themes that are explored by, say, the survivors, the first generation survivors, the second generation survivors, the third generation, and so on and so forth. And what is interesting is that the themes that are discussed by all of these generations, of course, are different. So they are very relevant. Two to even Max. I mean, Max, you just spoke about, you know, how the Holocaust is very far away in the past, but you still feel a connect. And as we know, we speak very often about intergenerational trauma. We speak about half trauma passed down through generations. And, of course, you know, the memory of the Holocaust is also important. So even in the context of you being a third generation survivor, there is a whole drawer and there's a whole panoply of literature of books and memoirs out there on the stories or the accounts told by third generation survivors that the themes of course, change the change through time. You know, the interests are different. So I have a question to ask you. Do you see any lessons in your great grandmother's collection that feel relevant to today's world or your own life? I mean, I, I think the biggest takeaway is the amount of hope that my family had even when they were in the ghetto. When you read the letters, there's just this this sense of like we have people in America, we have people who are going to survive and get through this and carry on the family and I think that's really important. I've been reading a lot of of memoirs from this time, and I think there's I see a big difference between optimism and hope, where optimism you're looking at the what's going on around you and hope is looking towards the future. And I think my family in Poland had a whole lot of hope that my great grandparents were going to rebuild the family, and that's exactly what they did. And so me as a third generation survivor, and I'm a product of that hope and and of that rebuilding that happened, my great grandparents came to America and it was just them. And there's a great quote. It's it's from the two of us came to this big family and. I'm very much a part of that. And I think me and all of my cousins feel the same way. We have that same connection to the family, which is that hope of our of our relatives who were lost in the Holocaust. Thank you. Thank you, Max. I turn to David now, in what ways have you ensured that your mother's experiences and the content of this book are preserved and honored within? Well, I think Max's mother and I put the book together. I did. I got all the translations done, but I didn't know how to do it, put it together in in a form that was at least a perusable And I think that the, the, the, the intensity with which my parents, especially my mother, pursued the hope and the and the dreams of coming to the United States was the thing that kept them alive during the war. They couldn't get to their parents. They couldn't have a discussion with them. There was no Internet. There was no well, there was a long distance phone, but it was almost impossible to afford. And so that's how they did it. And there's many a letter from her. There's one that I'll quote is when they found out my mother was pregnant with me is you have to know one little story before and I won't go into that. There's a whole bunch of stories related to her early life that are very fascinating. But she was raised because her mother had to be in Crimea where the weather was warm. And they thought that that helped you get better from the TV and so on. And so here's a postcard to my mother. We're so ecstatic about how you're going to have a grandchild for us. And they used my name is David Mordecai and so on and so forth. And so there's one letter where her mother is riding her and says.“Eat well, don't don't worry about food.” And she says, “Be sure to take your vitamins”, which I couldn't believe that.“And eat fruit. Fruit is good for you. Do they have fruit in the United States?” And that was that was I think that was more personality from her mother to her and from her to my sisters. The I can track that, let's put it that way. Juli do have you come across other instances where you you where other families have engaged in the same act of compiling the letters or sort of like any memories. Yeah, it's very strange. I don't know if it's very strange, but my very my very best friend, who I grew up with in St Louis, when her grandmother died, her mother found a shoebox full of letters. Also, there were even more. There's probably 100 in our collection, and they probably have almost 250. And her family wasn't from Poland, they were from Germany. And they had them translated and it was this of a very strangely similar experience that we were learning about our great grandparents and their families, their stories of of World War Two at the same time, and trying to put together these people who we didn't know but whose stories were very emotional in these letters. But also, like my dad said, there's there seems to be some holding back like they were they were almost censoring themselves, I think, a little bit in the letters. Anyway, So my best friend also had this from growing up, had the same experience of finding out about her family and and the few survivors who who made it here had these letters from the people who didn't make it. I am just thinking about, you know, we all knew when we produce any tapes, we tend to censor ourselves. We get a lot of what we've written because we we feel that suddenly certain things should not be mentioned. And I'm just curious, because we've spoken a lot about what was going on in the background and how that was sort of like disguised. And there was a certain, you know, different there was a different image being portrayed, of course. I think one thing is that at least in our letters and I think I know who she's talking about. Yeah, they always, they say we are fine, everything is good. We have a place to live, we have enough food and I don't know that that's really true because, you know, they had no jobs. They had nothing to pay for anything with. And how could that be? There are some unexplained things that like there's some references in the letters in my mother's family where my grandfather, my mother's father went back and forth between Łomża and the ghetto and I don't know how he did that. There's one where the my grandmother, Rose, says, your grandma or your father will be back for Shabbos this weekend. How did he do that? Did he bribe people? They had a business that was a very good business and in the town of Łomża But I don't know. There's there's no way. Everything was always. Fine. So have you tried to has anyone even Max? I mean, that would be a very interesting area of research. You know, Have you tried to find out, for instance, the historical facts of those times about that particular area and any sort of accounts about what was really going on that you could then compliment with all the letters that you found? And of course, as I said, what was not been mentioned the unsaid in these letters. I think I can give you two stories. The first one is a thing called the ghetto bench, and it was the inciting cause of my father and mother to come to the United States. My father couldn't get his license to practice medicine because of being Jewish, and he decided to go to Vilna, to the university. There called Stefan Batory at the University of Vilna that still exists. And I have his student card. They saved everything, which is I have a little treasure trove of these things. And his reference to me was “I went to Vilna, to the university to get training and maybe become a teacher or professor. But when I got there, I saw Jews being beaten on the steps of the university” and I can date that there was a riot January 27th, I think over a thing called ghetto benches where they tried to make benches in the back or any Jew, any Gypsy, a Jehovah's Witness, anybody that they didn't like, they would make them sit on those benches and they weren't allowed to participate in class. They could listen, but they could not participate. And then they tried to expel all of the Jews. And the president of the university in Vilna refused to do it. And the students rioted and there was the Pogrom And that was sort of the inciting cause. My father never told me that story. He told me that when I saw Jews being beaten on the steps of the school where people should be educated, I decided that was it. I'm not going to stay. there's one question, of course. I mean, this is probably a what made Juli and I start like I think the time when I came to see you, Julie, at home last December. We spoke about that, I think, in detail. And that's very crucial to our program today, which is you all went on a trip to Poland please tell me your experience, because I I sensed very different emotions throughout in terms of what I watched of that trip on the view that you sent to me. And I also heard one or two of the audio recordings that you recorded when you were there. So, yes, I would like to know that we had a good family in my house and a home and we played with each other, with our family and that was always good. And and we really. Got it on the trip. So. Right. So David is saying that I was right. You got of look. Okay. That's the point was that they everybody was going to Israel, not Israel. But well I'll give her story because she was center girl. She was with me on the 25th, our 25th anniversary trip when we discovered my father's house. But Gail was so taken with that and said she didn't want to go back. Yeah. And so I did. And so she didn't go on the second trip. I didn't. I didn't want to go to outfits. I just couldn't do it. Yeah. And the children and and the children were quite I think they were just fabulous. Fabulous. And but they didn't I don't think they felt how I felt about going into the. one of the things I wanted to do as carrying forward the the memorial, or if you want to use that word of my parents and our family was that I wanted everybody in the family to know what they had gone through because I was the only one that was collecting it. And I had one sister that physically couldn't do the trip, but the other sister went with us, along with her husband and her children, and we met a cousin that we discovered like three months before we left who says, my gosh, I'd love to do that. Can I meet you in Warsaw? And his name was Arthur Berwald And by golly, there he was when we got to Warsaw and he went on the trip with us. So this was sort of a knowledge trip that we wanted, our trip that I wanted our family and our children to have. And so I said, I don't care what it costs, I'm going to take everybody that wants to go. And so everybody but I guess everybody with Daniel went, Daniel, Sam. And so we had we had 19 people on the tour and I think it was very worthwhile because of the things that happened on the tour. there were a number of incidents on the trip and if anybody wants to add, please to Juli and Max is when we got to Poland, we met the young lady who was going to be our guide, and they had a van us. And I think it was one of the best trips I ever took in terms of accomplishing what you wanted to. And there were several things that just blew us away. And I think you've seen one of them as when we came Raczki and to show you how the interpretation of things is different. When we got Raczki, we got off the bus and there was a guide and another man who was a town historian, and they met us there and he said, and I brought some memorabilia and some pictures of the town and saw that my parents had brought. And the guy comes up to me and he says, Welcome to Raczki, and it's in the Suwałki District and so on and so forth. And have you seen, your father's factory. And I said, What are you talking about? They had a. farm. And the farm they lost the farm after, World War One, and moved into town. Well, I didn't know because my father never mentioned it, that his father, my grandfather, he and another family member and a friend and his best friend all had started a cloth factory and the building still existed in Raczki was the cultural center. They had a dance studio and they had computers. It's like, I guess it's it was like I was otherworldly and I never knew any of these things. My father told me we sold cloth. That was all he told then that the culmination of after we toured the town, we saw where the synagogue had been had been destroyed by the Nazis and where the cemetery had been. There was maybe one or two headstones left and the kids were very interested in that. And then we came back and we had this Silberstein installation. It's one of the few that are in Poland, and there's little brass plaques that are installed in front of the house where the person who was killed in the where they lived and the artist comes in and stalls and afterwards the entire town dances. Hora with us, I don't know if you know, it's Hebrew dance and so on and so forth. And it was just like, What is this going on? This is absolutely I could not understand it. It was like I did it. And to this day it's like, how did this happen? Well, the town was supportive of someone coming back. It's a little farm town. And they were there. There were 30 people dancing with. And so those are some of the things that we took. And then many other things like the visit to Auschwitz was really something to the. See, I can't do that. I couldn't do that. I couldn't do. It. And my mother's home town was a larger town. So we her house was destroyed and her family business was destroyed. But they took us to the exact spot where the house was So we installed some stones there to and the town welcomed us. We went to the cemetery and so on. This was all way beyond what I thought we could accomplish. I think all the children, they remember this now. And, you know, you look through the book of our trip and all the pictures and it gives a little bit of depth to our family. And that's what I wanted to accomplish. I would love to hear from Juli from from Max, you know, about your experience as well, because I think you've all had different experiences of that trip. And that's a very big sort of like in terms of just Holocaust studies, genocide studies in general. I think we very often emphasize the importance of memorializing, right? So this was an act of memorializing Of what would ever happen in the family. And I think it's also, you know, the act of that act itself has very many benefits to the whole family. And I want you to speak about that In your experience, if it's possible. So, we had someone who was leading us and and I was here and David wanted to go into Dad's. yeah, that's the other. I was. In the first trip this was in the first trip that just went. Yeah. Yeah. So, so who was it was it. There were let's see, I would say there were five men on the stoops, Stoops valley in suits. And, and so David wanted to know where the house was. And so I said it's over there. And so that was okay. And then we. Well, the point. You want to make. Yes. Okay. The point is, you say. That she took a picture of us and the women. Were. Pointing down the street. It's diagonally on the town square to the house and. Gail says that the thought crossed your mind at that moment, that, wow, that's what they did when they when the Nazis came in and they wanted to know where the Jews were and they were pointed out, and it's probably true. Yeah, that that is to me, I. Thought I will. Say I did my chest all the time. Yeah. I will say that was the other thing I'll tell you is that when the first time when we went there the the house was a store like a hardware store or something and my dad, this is a family, something that my dad respected his grandmother, meaning Mordechai’s wife. Her name was Bryna, and he respected her. He says she was the brains of the family and he respected her and thought of her as important person. And he says she slept in the living room next to a tile stove because that was the warmest room in the house. And I walked into the building that had been pointed out to us. And this is the one that first struck that. And there in the corner was a brown tile stove. And I said, my God, this is the clue. I break up it. This is the closest I'll ever get to my grandparents and and my great grandparents. And so that's where our family starts from that time also. So that was the other one I wanted to tell you. Thank you, David. So I'm also curious to hear from Julie and Max about. Yeah. Check. I guess I'll go and then we'll go in order. I'll say this I was nervous about going on the trip. I the Holocaust and. The stories have always been something that I have not embraced and I felt very nervous about. I did not want to go to Auschwitz either, like my Mom said, but my grandparents were so dear to me and I love talking to them about their childhood. The old I loved, I loved when they spoke in different languages. I loved my grandfather telling Bible stories. We would sleep over at their house on Friday when I was younger. Every Friday night we'd have Shabbat dinner with them and then I would sleep over and hearing the stories from their past was something I loved dearly. And so I wanted to go on the trip more to find those connections, then to connect with the scarier parts of their story, which were the yeah, the genocide part. And and I really even made a huge excuse not to go to Auschwitz, which was part of our trip, because I, I thought my daughter was too young and I didn't think she should go. But my daughter said, no, I can handle it. And so then I did have an excuse and I had to go. And I will say that walking through their camp and being with my family to do it was transformative. And I've come out of that feeling like, everybody should go to Auschwitz. Everyone in the whole world should walk through that camp, should through those gates, should should experience it and should should somehow internalize it in a way. And there was something about the reality of it that was more powerful than that, the imagination of it in a way that made me able to handle it. So I don't know if that makes any sense because it was horrible. But and, and I think it's really important. It was an important part of that trip that the end of the Auschwitz there's a room where there's a book that's six feet long. Maybe it takes up the whole room. I don't know if you've been there, but it's the names of everybody who was killed in the Holocaust. And so you can alphabetically go through it and you can. We found the page of the Berwalds. And seeing those names, I don't know why, but like it was something made me I was it made it real in a way that was really important. It's been important to me in my internalization of what happened to our family. I don't want to say it was healing, but there was something memorializing about it that made it powerful. That was one thing. Also, the going back to the Villages was amazing. I remember my grandma made all these pies all the time out of fruit and that village was literally in fruit. Fruit was falling off the trees. There were apples everywhere. Things. Yeah, peaches. I don't know. There was fruit all over that town. And I'm like, well, no wonder she baked with fruit all the time. And, and I and then we are seeing this the stones in the forest, the cemetery stones, and kind of noticing that the trees were 70 years old around the stones really felt like also an important thing to to witness. And then the dancing was I don't think any of us will ever forget that feeling of just holding hands with the people in this village and and dancing with them. And there was something someone said to me and one of the story and said, and my dad doesn't remember this, but a lot of historians said that it's possible that there were Berwalds in this village Raczki for 400 years. And to have. I. I, I can't because we are in this country for such a short time to think we were in somewhere else for such a long time made me feel connected to this planet. I guess in a longer, a more and an older way than I had felt before. I had gone to Poland. So it's those are sort of some of the top, top moments of that trip. Thank you. Thank you, Judy. Next Yeah, So I think my generation had a very different take on it, just because we don't have that connection to to to the to the great grandparents, to the people who actually lived there just because of our age. And I mean, I was 16 when we went. I didn't have that creative abyss of what actually happened. But the context about a lot of the things that I'm aware of now. But I really I think the biggest takeaway for me is what you call the third generation survivor, is that I was there with my family and my I was just looking through my roll and I have these videos of my of my grandfather, David, talking, giving me a tour of the village. And I think if if I lost like my entire camera roll, but that's it, I would be happy because it just shows how important it is that I have this connection between me, my parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents. And maybe 400 years before that's connected to this place that I don't even I didn't even know existed before we went there. And I just think being able to go there with my family was the most powerful part of this trip. I don't want to say that we were reclaiming the space because I don't think we were there to reclaim. We were there to memorialize. We were there to say, you know, look at what was lost, look at what has grown from that loss. And we were able to go back and really and really just cherish our lives as a whole. And I got a whole new appreciation for for just the the how our family works together and and how close we are. And I'm going back to Poland in May for part of this program I'm doing this semester, and I think it's going to be a very, very different experience in this one because not going with my family, I'm going with a more academic bend So it'll be interesting to go is I'm the only Jew in this program too. So that also gives me a different perspective. But I do think going as our family as to who we are today is that that was really powerful. It was definitely the most moving part of the trip. Thank you. Is there do you have a copy of the book of the Letters with me? Not with me, but I do have one. Yeah. My my grandfather gave every single one of the grandkids a book. Yeah. No, I was just hoping if you wanted to read like anything from it that. Was the one. The one that I would have read was when they found out that my grandfather was born, that I think my, my actually read about at the beginning of the program. I just think it's that letter for me. It just shows the connection, the direct connection between me to my grandfather, to my my family, who perished during the Holocaust, and them knowing that there is a future, there is going to be multiple generations in America that will continue on the family in some form. And so that for me was sort of the most powerful part, my favorite part of the book. I think it's in it it's it's from December, January 19 two, 1941. I think they said, David. Wait, hang on. Yeah, I read the one from Vienna, which is my grandfather. I think there's another one that. Yeah, I probably should read that one. Yes. He really great way of like facing everything. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. Let's see. I want the one with the chicken is like the best one. There are a couple here. I think it was the one at the big conference February 14th. Was that the one where they said they got a picture of Poppy? Yeah, I think so. A couple here. Hang on. Let me. I have it. Actually, I have it bookmarked, I think, in your book. do you want let me just. Read. I can read you this one and even this one. This one is from February. Okay. So and it's from, Yeah, this is the first record. Dad. I think the one from February, February 20th is the best one. Look at that. That's the one where it says, I'm happy you're breastfeeding. Really? yeah. Your mother and grandmother. Well, I wanted to. Look. Much loved the darling children find you and Israel. Mazel tov. Mazel talk. Mazel tov. May it be with great, good fortune. May you be happy parents. I get much joy. And not just from your lovable son. We just now got your postcard of December 23rd. We are filled with joy. Thank God that everything transpired easily and well. Like we to God for the whole time made everything go well for you. From now on, my dearest children, as we wish for you with all our hearts. How are you now, my darling daughter? How is your dear grandchild? May you all be will live happily and blessed as we wish for enough love my daughter. How have you been managing? Who helps you? If only we could help Medicare. Susan wishes you all the best. Write us detailed letters. Dear children, you're eternally faithful and devoted. Mother and grandmother and that was. That was the feel good part. That they never broke, that, you know, that we don't have food here. And you know this was the the ghetto was destroyed in the late 19th and mid 1941 and destroyed completely burned to the ground in the spring of 42. May killed 25,000 people there. Now. Julie, sorry, Do you want to read out something or shall we? I have I have just a last, but it's really up to you. Yeah, I. Think that's good. No, I think it's actually nice in my dad's voice, too. Okay. Yes, I think what your dad. What David read up is beautiful. I think so. A general question. I mean. Well, I have two questions, but the first. Okay, hit the first one. How do you feel about sharing this collection of letters that you have all compiled with a wider audience, potentially potentially impacting how others Holocaust history? I would love for that to happen, but I don't know how to make it happen. I, Juli and Lynn, Max's mother, essentially helped me to put this together. I will say that at the present time, still, I can't. The Holocaust Museum in Washington wants this stuff that I have. I have their green cards. I have the my dad's student cards, ID cards from France, Switzerland and Italy. And and and the one from Vilna that I mentioned before. And I have all these pictures which I've shared with the Holocaust Museum and Saint Louis, but the one in Washington that wanted me to donate the whole thing. And I can't do that. Juli's friends and they're good friends of mine because I went to high school with the mother's father and I'm sorry, with the mother's husband. He and I went to high school together, but in any case, they donated their whole trove of letters. But this is all I have. I have more. We have no souvenirs. We have no nothing other than these papers. And maybe a few and little items, one of which I did donate. And it was a wicker basket that mother brought her to. Sew. Weeping and what she called Joy. Trip. So she called it her. Trousseau to the United States. And I donated that to the Saint Louis Holocaust Museum. And so that's where we're at on this. And but I would be more than happy to publish the book more formally. I say there's a few little things that we could, but we basically put it together with the letter on one page and the translation on the next. And it takes time. It takes a lot of time and effort, but I'm willing to do it. Thank you. Max. Do you have such, such a plan? Do you have a plan to do something with this collection? I mean, the question that we always ask is, is historians and people considering these primary documents just like what makes them stand out, what makes them special? And I mean, I think coupling these documents with our trip and the intergenerational impact of these documents and the subsequent trip is what makes this makes everything special, in my opinion. I mean, as a student, I would love to do something with these documents. I would love to sort of reconstruct it in a way that I could pull out a couple of themes, a couple takeaways. But I do think that looking at these documents, a correspondence between people who were in a ghetto and people who were living comfortably in America is is is powerful for people learning about the Holocaust because it shows a whole new dimension. You read a lot about people who are physically in the Holocaust, but I don't think there's a whole lot about people who have escaped but still have family that are in Europe. And they're also getting this second hand information, maybe even guilt from like a survivor's guilt of what's happening. And I think the survivor's guilt was a big thing in our family. My grandfather talks a lot about silence around these letters, not translating them. And I think that's a big psychological aspect. But I just think that these these documents to highlight this a whole a whole different side of the Holocaust that people don't really talk about, which is like the splitting of families. And it does it at least for for me, it makes me more appreciative of the reason that I'm here today and how lucky I am I think what is interesting is how, Max, you seem to be basically highlighting all the main points in this process of figuring out how to work, for instance, towards, as I said, memorializing this collection letters. And you are right to say that I was reading a paper by the what is it called? It's called the Montreal anything. It's called the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. MIGS. And they published a paper on unpublished Holocaust memoirs. And this book is about the fact that, you know, the analyzed in the a few of the Holocaust memoirs where it were analyzed, those that were unpublished, as I said, it range from like 10 to 15 pages to a whole book. And of course, we would be curious to know why they were not published. And of course, one of the reasons one of the reasons given was that, you know, these these memoirs were not publication worthy because they didn't conform to certain rules, which Juli you know very well. Every publishing industry has its own rules. In fact, we also knew that some of the canonical writers such as Primo Levi, Primo, Primo, Levi, Elie Wiesel, Elie Wiesel, actually even their works were rejected when they were sent for publication, including Otto Frank, who's the father of and Frank. All the works were actually rejected by the publishers because they just didn't appeal to the to the demand to demand out there. And, you know that the publishing industry is very much fake to the demands of writers and the themes that they want to read at that particular time. So I think Max just listening to you. Sort of makes me realize how you're very aware of the demands of the industry and you're aware that you have to conform to some of their demands for your work to be there and for it to be published. And you're very right. I think you have been able to highlight even the the crucial, distinctive factor about this collection, which is it's an account telling the experience of those who've managed to escape. And you rightly pointed out that word, you know, which is luck, right? Lucky You know, you feel lucky because a lot of the survivors who write about their experiences, those who escaped that possibility, they speak about where they ask themselves this question, how did I get to where and not the person next to me? And sometimes that selection or that attraction based on just simple luck, someone had had the mind to walk away, to get up, to just do the right thing and get away from a tragic experience. So yes, it was a big word. I wanted to I wanted to add two things. One, just about what you were just talking about in this Survivor first generation survivor group that I've been going to. The meetings there was we were each telling our stories and we just a little blurbs from it. And this one guy got up and said that his family had survived because when his mother and father were in line for the train, some man walked up behind his father and said don't get on the train, get on the truck. That's all he said. And the man that took that got on the truck went to a slave labor camp, escape from there. And the family survived. And then I wanted to add one last thing. This is from my father to you and to. Our. Family, because I've that so many times is that I once was just chatting with him and he said, you know, I really don't regret any of the things I did in my life. I regret the things I didn't do. And that was the way I felt about this trip. Everybody said, Why are you taking everybody? I said, Because I want to. It's the right thing to do and I want to do it. And so that I'll leave that with you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I had there were many powerful moments and this is I'm off of you know, I'm not speaking. I'm going to be recording this, but I'm just saying that and, you know, there were many powerful moments where there were many goosebumps moments in this conversation. And you also make a wonderful family. Feel lucky about that. Yeah, we do. We did, for sure. Sure. I'm very proud of our family. But I don't know, I think. Know. I have to look at Julie's very extended biography on Wikipedia as well, and it's very, very. That's where the textbook stuff came from. And did you need to edit it? I need to edit it. Yeah, I. Will. Well, thank you for listening to us. I think we're all very grateful to to that you're interested in the story. We're also grateful for the work you do around genocide and, and, and trying to tell these stories. It's, it's, it's so important. So thank you for that. And I will go and send you links to those to this. And Abby just like to me a confirmation also that if you're okay with the whole family, just having snippets of that, the video, if you could ask them, because I think they appear in the video. the rest of the people from the. Yeah. But so I know since there's so many people I will not with the bits I do want to do I do I do want to put the dance, you know that was just to me and just maybe a few seconds of the dance and you're all family members. It shouldn't be a problem. Well, there. Were village people in it, too. Yeah. So you don't know who they are. Right? Well, let me see if my You know what? It was filmed for the news. It was on the news also. So the rights are with you. The rights for that original that. Yeah, that video came from Lori. Yeah, I think I think that was the news broadcast for the next day that someone out of town visitors had come the the village is a farm village and a small town. At one time it was 60% Jewish, but that was in the 1800s. But the the the county main seat. And if you want to try and find it, there is a really fascinating movie that was made in 1937 and it was made by a man from Chicago and it's called that which will be no more, I think is what it was called. And it was essentially a trip he took with a camera in 1937. And it is in Souvlaki and Filipov and it doesn't show rats, but Filipov and Roths were like sister cities about six miles out of town from Suvorov. And it has some fabulous pictures of movies of the marketplace and of the synagogue that was a giant synagogue and survived. And all that's gone. The last Jew in survival died maybe ten years ago. But I'll. You know. Laurie made that video, so I'll just I think if she gives permission, it will probably suffice for a lot. So I'll get I'll get I'll ask Laurie. And if you could also send me the audio recordings, like if we could find out, I mean, we have a lot of sort of like primary material. You know, I read the I mean, sorry, the letters. We have you reading it and then we've got that the video footage. So I think we do have a lot of material. Ever you come across anything that audio recording because have about I plan to do broadcasts on the well next weekend. my gosh. Yeah a lot of word. Quite quickly so my producer if I get any questions my producer will be so like you said, you'd be in touch with you, a copy copy you on email so that you can connect with him. But I think just permission for the video footage for now would be okay. All right. I'll I'll touch base with Lori about that. Fantastic. So thank you so much and thanks for your time. This was your time, too. I think what struck me, because I watched that video a few times, is really that image of when you are putting the stones, and I still have that, which is very vivid. Do I have your permission to play that little excerpt of the video just which is credited at the end of the program. Something. Sure. Yeah. Sure didn't like to be there. I think it would be very nice to have that. Yeah. Okay. So, can you see me now? yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, can you see me now? yeah. See, I can unmute the. There. There you are. Thank you. Can you start the you start the video two. Down here in the corner. Just David's iPad three. It's got a little finger in it. You just feel little. I can tap it. It says, plus, should I push plus? Yes, there it is. David's iPad three and this tap there. On this video. Microphone. No, I can see the round circle and the oval. That's a person. It says recording and recording. And I can hear, you. Know, tap this and see if it. Works. You can see a video. Camera. And just see. You can see me. You know. Okay, let's see. I'm going to have you show me your iPad to figure out how to get here. Okay. Yes. I don't know if this is. Okay. Show me your. Show me the screen. See, I. Got a bear. That goes. Okay. yeah. The camera is. There's a picture up in the corner. So. All right, well, at least you got shorts. I don't know why your camera's not working. Well, Here, let me campus. No. And speakers working. Part and don't like. Okay, well, let me get this for. I see you up here. With your hands. Sorry. I don't know why your videos are not working. You can hear me, though, right? Yeah. Beautiful. And I can hear you. So I think this. This is is this is fine, because I. Like I said, it's just a video. I mean, it's just going to be for audio. Audio? Okay. And don't know why your videos now are going. You have a video on that iPad, right? Yeah. It says Zoom audio. What about where it says keypad? No. there's a camera there. click the camera. Doesn't want to do anything. Yeah, I saw that. It didn't look like it was. Usually when it doesn't, you know, there's a line through it when it's not on. Right. There was no. There's no line through it. No. Something about it isn't picking up. I think. We need been. Yes, even. Nothing is working other than the sound is working just fine. Yeah, the sound is working great. So I don't. I feel like we should just keep that there. Oops. No. wait a minute. There it was. Shoot. really? Start video. did you wait? It went away. Wait a minute. Okay. Do that again. Yeah. Okay, You didn't. Okay, now, wait. Yeah, that's. Can you put the iPad up higher? Because see how it's looking at the bottom of your chin? Can you put it on a piece of book? A couple of books or something? Here, I've got a book right here. If I don't have to go get the book, I'll get one. I know we're just the big ones. Or just something a little. Do you know what I'm saying? Yes. He's on his way. Look, I can show you my. SO, maybe. But that's pretty, Mum. That's beautiful. Is that new? Okay. All right. Yeah. That's good, Dad. Better. That's a little bit. It's still staring up at the ceiling. yeah, that's. That's good. Can you get it to be like that? I just gotta sit back in the chair. okay. It's just kind of angled up at the ceiling, so. Yeah, right. But, yeah, that's better. Okay. Because otherwise, it's kind of looking up your nose. Well, it's not up there. Well, I know I. Okay, let's see. I got one. Much. More 0 minutes, but make sure it's holding. Yeah. So if I go like this. Yeah. Can you chip up the back of it a little? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. There. That's better. Better. I just hold it. Well, now don't hold it. That's. No, don't hold it. Get a book or something. Well, it is. It's got a book already. I need a. We need another book. I need something just to hold the back end. Right. Right. And half a button. How about now? Yeah, that's okay. Yeah. Okay. That'll say that if I move it forward. Yeah, that's better. Okay, we got it. We got it there. Okay. Yeah, that's fine. That's good. Right? Okay, We got. A break for Max. At 6 minutes. Okay. I can go do something else. Just leave it alone. Do you need a snack? Where is that? Where is your. The lady that's gonna sleep by? Yeah. Her name is Abba, so I don't know where she is. I mean, she lives here in Austin, but she works at Texas State, which this video is coming through. Texas State, which is down. And so. It's. Okay. if I sit like this, it's probably okay also. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's just see how it's angled up at the ceiling. See, like that. I was thinking if you could make it more horizontal, more. Vertical. As that. Yeah, that's better. But you got. I don't want you holding it. I want it propped up. Where there's one more knot way back here. How's that? Yeah, that's good. That is. That's good. Okay. Okay. All right. I'll move back. Okay. Got your coat on, Mum. Of course you know. It's really cold down. There. The sun came out this morning finally. Yeah, it was nice. Yesterday they played golf, but I didn't have a chance to play. Yeah, so Mom went to lunch with us. Lions Choice. God, Dad. Well, where they were. this is yesterday of Marshall. And then we're all happy to see Emma. We had lunch and we took. you really? But can you. Guys go somewhere healthier than lions choice? this was just for we had a couple of fries and a burger and, you know, the little hamburger. But go get that picture. Have you seen the picture of you at the fair at the El Al Libi? they know No, I'm going to go get my copy of the Find your book, too. I'll be right back. Okay. Gail. Where's the picture? You just had it in your hands at the desk. We could show her the picture that we're going to pick up later. Yeah, well, just come in here real fast, okay? Hang on one second. Okay. Well, that's not it. Here it is. No, this is correct. Yeah, I. I actually think the hair actually. yeah, I've seen that. Yeah. That's so cute. We made an enlargement of it. Yeah. And we took away. There's another picture that shows the outside of the factory that shows this back and it shows the beams. And so we had a guy fix it and he took away the beams. I don't know how the heck he did it and made it so you could see the whole sides. And so that's the only sign. No, no, we'll. Put that back right up there. You could you could see the whole sign now and somehow you couldn't before. neat. He took away these. The shadows. Yeah. And so now it looks like just the side of the factory wall. That's really. Nice. We're going to put it down of the display downstairs. Good. Did you see what I did back there? I. I bought some stands. Dad. That stands. Doesn't it make it look better? yeah. And of Carnelian. I saw. It. Which one is that? that's the piece I found embedded in the arrows on a bank. Look. Yeah. It looks nice on a stand. Looks great. You won't find another piece. That's good. Yeah. We were dry, You remember when it was like 112 and Mom was sick and you guys. Just. Swimming, and I went right coming down, stuck in a cactus. Yes. All right. That's where that came from. We moved. We went from Gallup, New Mexico, into northern Arizona. Right. Just together. I did that. She was looking at put this back so I don't lose it. Put it back with the disk. It's just the disk. Okay. Put all this back together. Anyway, that's where that came from. And we were driving along and I saw it sticking out of a bank along the road. I remember. That. I do remember that night. Say that. Yeah. Yeah. So I stole it from your house. That's. I love. I think it's the prettiest. Yeah. What is. The problem? Is that Carnelian on the inside is going to be sort of a grid seller. there's Maxwell Solomon. really? Yeah. Yeah. Is that because of the U.V. Makes it? Yeah. Yeah. yeah. Turns it red. It's so pretty here. they're. All. Is it? Well, hello, Maxwell. Hey, Poppy. I, i g i What's going on? We're getting on a podcast. So, birthday boy. How those on the podcast. Dava Monet. Didn't text me. That Saturn ceremony. Not much. Just ready to talk about our trip. All right. Where are you? Look like you're in our house. You do look like you're at our house. Look like you're. One of the study rooms at my apartment. Whoa. you are kidding me. G.G. That looks just like when you went to college. Yeah, right. Yeah, you're right. I recognize this. The painting from it? Yeah, that's Aunt Margaret's painting. That's true. yeah? Yeah. So how are you, sir? Pretty good. Older? You're older? I'm older. If you work on it, you could catch me if you work at it. Shot me an 88 doc. you're kidding me. No, I finally broke 90. my God. That's great. Congratulations. Thank you. Bye. Around for everybody. No, no, Because one guy with me shot. A 73, so he still had the. my God, Brad. I mean. Max probably knows who that is. Deena. Jeff Cohen. yeah, Yeah. Dude, he's good. Scratch. He's. He's a one. Yeah. Sandy Capital Pride. Really? Yeah, he's crazy good. But it was fun. I'm playing today. I'm playing tomorrow. Yeah. You got the regular four. We're still on the windy, chilly side. They played yesterday, but I couldn't. I couldn't get with them. Yeah, we had a we had a separate meeting, but they didn't play any better than they were that they would have told me about it because my you and I went and had lunch with them as the health food store lions choice. That's a hell of a. Health food store you got going. For. Where did you go last night, by the way? She's logging in, she said. But no, no, it's the service. that's nice. And then we can call. For the yard. Site. My dad's yard site? Yeah. Yeah. I thought that you were going to dinner afterwards. I guess we went to dinner before. Just because you old people need to eat early. That's sure embarrass you. Doing good. Yeah. Yeah, I think she. It was. Nice. It was. It was. Good. She, she was really happy. People went and. Yeah, it was a. Lovely service. Yeah. that's great. Yeah. Right. What's the. They've got the, they've got it down there at best. Yellow one our Friday night. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Like they were doing them, they were doing the announcements started at seven, they were doing announcements at 757. Under the, you know, messing around about 47 is the point. Yeah. Yeah. Now it was beautiful. It was really nice. And then we came back here and had key lime pie, which Paul would have liked. my God. I remember him the last. What was it, The last big meal we had in your house? He ate the key lime pie and the other pie. Both, of course. Yeah. He's like, No, no. Meals are just in the way, doc. Yeah. It's all about dessert, right? And his mom gave him four pedicures for his birthday. She hands me four envelopes each. One is a pedicure. Grab the mangoes. That's not. Enough. go grab. right. Yeah, but he's probably. Not wrong, guy. Yes. Bad feet. But my dad gave them to me so I can blame him. That's right. So. All right. What's your podcast? It's about our trip to Poland. okay. But she said she just texted. She said she's logging in. Is this for access? No, it's this woman's. No, I met her through the, like, Writers group in Austin. But she's a she's a professor of genocide studies. At. At Texas State. nice. Cool. Was that Max. Yeah, but I'm. I do not disturb them at all. So I don't know. shoot. If I could tell your mom to turn phone. Back on after since it's okay. Sure. You remember. I'll send her a text because she wants to hear it. All right? She looks at it. He knows how to. Look at it. Right? Well, she's not text. I mean, she'll be here. I'm sure she'll be here soon. I don't know. Are you are you going to go to Battle Creek with him. And your time, maybe. Or should I take him. Now if just don't want to? Yeah, I think we're. On the block and I could take him later. Okay. I'll be happy. Okay. Since we saw somebody walking or blues yesterday. Really? They were all has the dark red color all for a. Yeah, yeah. Literally. We'll go for a walk. I don't think I'm. I meant to point that out to you. Remember we were somebody was walking. Let's go for a walk. All right. Bye, guys. Bye bye. Well, knowing you, Nice knowing you. Nice knowing you. You need to call her. Maybe she just texted me and said she's logging in. I don't know. We can be. Suspicious. She's coming. Where is it? Right there. The level is above All right now. I'm so sorry I'm late. My computer is extremely slow, so took me 6 minutes to get in. God. I need to do something about it. But how are all of you. Flying. Over. To? I'm so happy we were able to make it. And thank you very much for spending time here and for allowing me to do this. This is like this is a big honor and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Thank you. Beautiful. Yeah. So just this is my wife, Gail, who Jill is Mother. I kind of guess that, like, I'm trying to and I've got all the pictures, of course, and I saw the video as well. The one that she sent. I watched it again just to make sure this morning. Know the short clip that you sent up about 11 minutes from. From the visit. Yes. I did. And I also have Julie, do you remember the audio recordings you sent me? The what? I send them. I sent my whole. Folder. You sent me, like, quite a few clips. This is when we met, I think. When was that? December or something like that. So I if you if you do have some time because I think that got erased on, on iMessage, if you could just pick a few and send them to me again with your permission. Of course if we could play them at the beginning of the, of the videos, it would be nice of the whole program. Have you had a chance to look at our show like our our, our podcast? okay. That does actually, I have a producer, but he's not here right now because he's also a violinist and he's away, he's performing, but usually he comes in and he co-host with me. So today we're just it's just me co-hosting. Let me just make sure it's recording. Yes, it is. So if ever you make any mistakes or you want to censor anything you've said, just let me know. We'll do it again and feel free. And of course, Judy, I'll send you a copy before I publish it, just to make sure you're okay with everything. That's all. That's. That's what we do all the time. And by the way, this will be recorded on video, which means that we will have a video of this on YouTube. And. Yes, it will be on YouTube as well as on Spotify. The audio recording, I think Max probably knows how it works. And so we have a session, we have our podcast not to forgive, but to understand, you know, that's like our slogan. Okay, so are you looking at because have the book here, do you have a copy with you, Julie, by any chance or. Yeah, I think we probably all have copies. So, you know, I. Was I was hoping I could do it myself, but I think it would be nicer if one of you did it to, like, just pick an extract. Like, maybe a favorite of yours, and then, like, we could put it in context and, like, you know, start the whole video like that. So it should be the whole session should be hopefully a maximum of an hour. It could be much less. But as long as I feel we have substance to go, we should be fine. We should be good. Yeah, well, I'll preface this a little bit. Yes. As a well, in St Louis, there's a Holocaust museum and I've just recently joined the group there. That is for generations Survivor. And that's what they consider me because my parents survived, even though they were not exposed to the war like their families were. But it was by one year. They came here in 1938 and the invasion was in 1939. And so that's what they consider. And I didn't realize the significance of that. What what I have subsequently found out about it is that we are we never really had grandparents, my sisters, We didn't know the personnel of the of our grandparents. We knew who they were initially. I'd never even seen a picture initially, but we we just hadn't. How do I put it has no feeling for what kind of people they were and that that was always something that bothered me all of my life because I had known girls and man, we called my parents best friend. They were our uncle and aunt. The lady next door in the apartment we lived to, she was an aunt. She sent me a birthday card every day, every year until she was 95 years old. And so that was what initiated my delving into our family history. And so that's the beginning. All of my life I had wanted I had felt like I wanted that kind of a thing. I knew it was a different society. I knew it was different people. But the only feel for it I got was from my father or from my mother. And they were real strong personalities, as Julie can tell. And so that was how I was introduced to my grandparents. And I'll preface one more thing and tell you that, and then you can ask me anything more. When Gail and I were married in it, and after 25 years, we, I sort of insisted that we, my parents were still alive, that we take a trip. And at the time Poland and Russia were both communist, but we did it anyway because it was a tour and we were able to be safe relatively, although I did some stuff on that trip that was not very safe and was really stupid. But I got away with it, like driving in Poland when it was a communist government and I had no license. So anyway, that that was in 1989 and we went to Poland. We had a a guide and we had one day to meet this guy in Warsaw and he took us on a tour of my parents, two towns. We had no information to go on. There is a picture that our wife took of the guide and me and two old men who had been sitting on a step in the town square and Trotsky. And the guide went up to them and I heard him mention our name and pointed across the way because my dad gave me a lot of information. He said, We lived two houses from the corner. That was it. And so I knew I was near the baker's house. Well, we identified the bakers house and then these two old men pointed out the Burwell house, and that was when I discovered that my father's house had survived the war. My mother's house did not. And so this trip was the genesis. The genesis of this trip, rather, was this trip in 1989 when I only had one day to see anything. And so I'll let you go from there and just ask away. This is great information. You know, it's it's valuable to, like, fit it in into the whole program as well. Let's just do this for our audience. But first, let me just start with a little introduction, okay? Yes. So would you like just quickly introduce yourselves to me, just like first names and last names for need to get to put it down in my notes so that I introduce you above. So. Julie, I do. I do. And I think I've prepared a little bio for you. If you could just give me your name and I'm going to take it to. Start with me or. Yes, like David about David Burwell. My middle initial is m R for Mordecai. I changed my name from Morton, which I don't like to Mordecai which I do like. And so that's that's me. I was until this past December, practicing physician. I did general surgery and family practice. Thank you. And Max, I think Max Max, you and I have met. Is there anything else you'd like to tell me. A. Little bit about yourself. So are you a UT student at the moment? Is that correct? Yeah. I'm Max Stein. David is my is my maternal grandfather and Julie is my aunts. I ama I'm a third year student at the University of Texas and I'm studying a history of. Okay. And you're a history student. You want Gail also. This is is taking part in our our zoom session. You want to. Your name is Gail. As. Well I'll give you that. That say it again so it comes through a little clearer. Okay. Gail and her middle name is is one of many but we'll use this time. And Burwell her last name and she was a teacher in Saint Louis and taught gifted students and regular classes. Thank you. I'm actually a little hesitant about the you know, I don't want to make this too long as well. So I'm actually contracted a little bit. I will just maybe I'll just do with the with the first names, you know, since. Well, there's Max of course your your last name is different. But let, let me see what I can work with this. Okay. Let me just start this deduction and B and then we can stop. Deal. Please do feel free to to speak up if ever you know, if you want to add anything to the conversation, you know. Things. Okay thing so I do have a general questions for anyone for everyone got it. So that should be fine. Okay. Let's just begin. As I said, please feel free if you if you feel that you have said something that you want to retract, just see. I want to see the sentence again and then go ahead. Okay. Julie, Bold is a is an ocean scientist and science writer based in Austin, Texas. She's the author of the science memoir and two science textbooks. And her magazine length pieces have appeared in The New York Times and National Geographic, among other publications. Bold is the author of The Science textbooks Focus on Earth Science, California, Grade six and Focus on Life Science, California seven published by Blanco McGraw-Hill in two. And okay, that's the second one. I do this again. In 2007, a Science Me was famous The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Doing a Backbone was published by Riverhead, and in 2022, her Life's on the Rocks. Building a Future for Coral Reefs was published by Penguin Random House. And we are here today to speak to Julie Beaumont of Father David Bold and mother Gilbert Ward. And. Her nephew, Max Stein, third year university history student at U.T., on a very different subject. And this is what we will discuss in a short while. Okay. I'm going to just do this very quickly again. Okay. And actually, it's both of those books are are Riverhead is an imprint of Penguin Random House. So I don't know if they're but they're both Riverhead and they're both Penguin Random House. So I don't know. So I will just which can I just put it down to Penguin. Right. Yeah. You can. Write. Are you okay with the introduction? As in. The textbooks? I've actually written like about ten of those textbooks. There's kind of Glencoe, McGraw-Hill textbooks. But like, you can skip that part even just completely. The two is. Fine. Yeah. You know what? I will actually just mention the ten textbooks, and then I will. I will then just mention that it's published by McGraw-Hill. McGraw-Hill and then I. Will. Write. Right. Seems again. Okay. Sorry, everyone. Faster. Up to this. Okay. All right. Juli Berwald is an ocean scientist and science writer based in Austin, Texas. She's the author of The Science Me More Intense. She is the author of the Science Memoir and ten science Textbooks. And her magazine length pieces have appeared in The New York Times and National Geographic, among other publications. The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone was published by Penguin Random House, and in 2022, her Life on the Rocks building a future for coral reefs was published by the same organization we are here today to speak with her, as well as a father David and mother Gail and her nephew Max on a very different subject, which we’ll begin with a reading of an excerpt from a diary. But before we do that, Juli would you like to tell us a little bit about this diary and about the genesis, about the reason why there was a compilation of this diary by the family by your family? Yeah, I guess I would call it. It's more of a collection of letters than a diary. And my dad can talk about it in more detail. But basically my father's grandparents, my father's parents were the only ones of their family to survive the invasion of Poland and the subsequent Holocaust. And my dad grew up, he often says, without knowing much about his grandparents and but after his mother died, that's my grandmother in the bottom of the China cabinet. My dad discovered around 100 letters, and those letters had been written from my grandparents family to my grandparents. After my grandparents came here in 1938, the letters were written in multiple languages. They were in German, sorry, not German, they were in Russian. They were a lot were in Yiddish, a couple were in Italian. They were a lot of languages. And so it took a long time. And I think my dad can speak to this more to get them translated. But ultimately he did and compiled them into a book. And so the excerpt I want to read, which I haven't talked to my dad about yet, is from this from February 12th, 1941. It is the I think one of the big question marks my dad always had was whether or not his grandparents knew he had been born. And this letter was proof that they did know that my dad had arrived in the world. So it goes Dear Israel. Israel was my grandfather's name, Dear Israel. Yesterday I got the happy news about your newborn son. I wish you a lot of happy moments and long years with your son. Finally, after such a long wait, I'm very happy. The only problem is I cannot see the child. It has been a long time since I got any information from you that can be explained by the fact that you forgot our address. But I hope this is not the case. How is Vanya doing? Vanya was my grandmother. Manya cannot write because her eyesight recently has been bad. Her eyes are watering all the time. Recently, Mamma is not feeling very well, but there is nothing we can do about it. Maybe it will get better in the future. Write to us more often. Margalit Margolis got some beautiful clothing. It was sent three months ago. I wish you a lot of help and health and happiness Minna and Minna was my grandfather's sister and my middle name is Minette. I was named after her, so she knew that my dad had been born. too. King. David. Would you like to tell us what you feel about this extract and what sort of emotions it stirred in you? Well, I yeah, I think that what I was looking for in the in the letters, which is sort of my mother was sort of a pack rat just like I was. I am. And we didn't know I knew that she had some letters because I had seen a scatter scattering of them over the years. But she had a drawer on that kind of cabinet that she threw birthday cards and stuff into. And so I'm going through birthday cards with every person they ever knew. And all of a sudden I start finding these letters. Some were folded up. Most of them were postcards. And as Juli said, we found those appreciable number. Plus I found a whole load of letters, about 40 that had been written by my mother to my father in 1938, the year that they came to the United States. And those were all in Polish. And the reason for those letters is that my father's uncle brought the two of them to the United States under his sponsorship in 1938. There was very few Jews that were allowed to come to the United States. I think the entire country had 20,000 immigrants, and that's it for the whole year of 38 and 39. But anyway, the dad's uncle had shipped my mother down to Houston with some other family. She had never experienced weather like they have in Houston with the humidity and the heat and so on. She came from a northern country and so most of these letters detailed things that she did with this Aunt Rachel, who lived in Houston and the rest of the Berwald. I never met them. They never took us down to Houston or Dallas. I've resurrected a lot of these friends since I started looking into his genealogy to sort of finish that little story. We had a pathologist at my hospital where I was a surgeon who was from Poland, and I brought the letters to him and we would come once a week and he would translate. And he I'll never forget he made a cute saying. He says, These are your parents, you know, personal thoughts. Are you sure you want me? I said, That's all I have. I have got to have it. So he and I would scribe and he would translate the letters for me. And there was one actually that Juli did was an Italian, because my father had some of his training in Italy, knew nine languages, and then the rest was a real problem because they were all written in script Yiddish. And it's not print Hebrew, it's looks like chicken scratch, But that's what they were written it and I couldn't find. Everybody would tell me, yes, I know Polish. I mean, I know Yiddish. But they didn't and they didn't know how to do a script. Yiddish did never translated any of these letters. So I ended up going through YIVO, which is the Yiddish preservation organization in New York, and they got me a translator and it was not cheap, but I really didn't care. And we got all the letters translated. So that's the genesis of the book. It's very interesting that you say that because in my study of memoir literature of the Holocaust, what I found out was that although many scholars see today that that period post-Holocaust was silent, there were no publications perceived from survivors. And there are other scholars who've come in to contradict that statement and say there were tons people wanted to write about the experiences, but unfortunately there was a problem of language. Basically, all of these memos were in Yiddish and therefore not accessible to the English speaking world. So it's interesting that Juli now David just mentioned that you translated that letters, that letter which was in Italian, the Italian parts of the book today. I'm curious. I mean, you're a writer. I'm a writer too. And I know that sometimes we do engage in some translation work, but if we are to translate a letter or something as precious as this letter that you were translating, I'm curious to know whether you experienced anything different. What were your thoughts during that translation process? Well, my grandma was pretty miserable, so like, I think my dad's like she didn't like the weather. And the the truth is the the family that wasn't her family. It was my grandfather's family. They were horrible. They were not nice to her. I mean, I think that can be an experience of immigrants. And so and she thought that they were kind of kooky, like their behaviors were. So they were. One there was one person in the family who was. I don't think he was really maybe a great person. And so she was stuck with these people who weren't treating her great. She was sort of not loving. And so it was I, I mean, my grandma, like my dad said, was a big personality, but it made me she was she was, you know, in her twenties, late twenties when that was happening to her. And it helped me kind of connect with her in a way. I mean, I could put myself in her position and sort of understand why she was writing. And it was very honest. She was very honest with my grandfather. And I'll throw in here, yeah, that there's one letter in which she was she writes, We are always so friendly and good when we are apart like this. How come we argue when I come home? Well, that was that letter, Dad. That was the Italian, right? And it's funny because they did. They fought like they fought like crazy. And they they insulted each other in different languages because they spoke so many because they'd had to move all over Europe for my grandfather to come get his education because of the anti-Semitism. But, you know, there was true there was love between them even though they they they fought it was kind of part of the relationship. And I think that's one thing like one thing that persecution can do is it can reduce the humanity of people to the numbers and and and to the the the idea of being persecuted. But like these letters reveal personality, which is humanity. And that's like what I find so important about them. And Now obviously our audience doesn't know about the contents of this book, this collection of letters. I'm curious to hear what marked the three or four of you, rather, in, you know, when you perused the collection, what were the bits that you would like to discuss in terms of the persecution that we were experiencing and how was it approached? You know, in those times. I think that I'm going to change one word that she used and that is persecution. I think it was this is what happened and that was the way they viewed it. They I, I keep getting a feeling that there was a lot more going on in the day to day living like they were in a ghetto and in Belarus called Słonim and the Słonim ghetto had 25,000 people in it. And as far as we know, that's where they died. There was no trains, there was nothing taking them to Auschwitz or Birkenau or any of that. They did mention that it was hard to get things, you know, and they were very specific about saying, do this or do that. Well, send us this or send us that. Yeah, send us that. And they would they wanted to try and get better things. My mother's family, I think, was more well-to-do than my father was family, although that's maybe not quite true, I'm not sure. But I know, for example, this is there's one or two examples of it just blow me away is the ghetto was destroyed by the Einsatzgruppen, which was the murder squads from. And yet we got a postcard that is dated June 22nd or third, and the Einsatzgruppen came in and started liquidating the ghetto. On June 27. We still got a postcard from and that's the last postcard we got. But how did that happen? How did normal everyday things happen? And, they, the two families, would get together every week and they would have dinner together or Shabbos together. And Juli mentioned the the thing where they they killed a chicken and had a big meal celebrating my birth. So that and Dan's father would write these letters like we've had a difficult time but we've come out the other end and things will get better now and he also statements that after the invasion in 39 that they ran away to a town which I've been through and it's only ten miles away, but it was on the other side of the border. And so the Russians took it over and they he said the Russians were pretty nice to them And and his brother, my dad's brother had a job as a I don't know what a clerk or something like that. Those are things that they tried to make it sound as if they were doing all right. But there's an undercurrent in the letters that it wasn't. All right. You know, my dad tried to send them wool blankets and and some cloth, and I can't remember now whether they ever got it or not. But they and I, I did not find any evidence like the joint distribution committee would transfer money, but I don't know that they ever got any packages from Dad. They would beg for these things in the letters, but they didn't get very much. Thank you. Thanks for sharing this, Max. I have a question for you. How has your great grandmother's diary shaped your understanding of the Holocaust compared to what you've learned at university? Yeah, I mean, I, I do have a particular interest in this area of history. It's something that I feel is very much in my blood. It's part of my heritage. And I think reading some of the letters about the the ghettos and how my family actually lived that experience compared with reading other people's diaries, reading other memoirs from people in other ghettos gives me this sense of connection and this deeper understanding of what happened. And so I think these letters have really have really sparked an interest, not just academically, but also emotionally. For me, just because I have I have, you know, all of these people that went through this experience, unlike some of my other classmates. And so I really do feel like I have a very different view of all of these events because I have these letters, because I have these personal primary documents, if that's what we can call them. And I think it's really interesting that I can draw upon the experiences of my own family rather than someone else who, you know, has been published and might seem very far off and academic. Where it's this source is something that's very close to me and it's very much a part of me as a person. Thank you. I would just take this question again, because I do want to call it a diary of something to correct that. And then I will take a second. We'll do a second question with you, Judy. Did you catch that? Did you catch it? No, I missed I actually miss. But I just I just repeat the question. So I edited. Didn't get it right before we put to Max. Max, is it okay. So I want to add one thing is that Max does have a special honor in that he was the last baby of grand children held by my father. Very as he was. I don't know. Max, How old were you when I was weeks. Yeah. Yeah. It's very interesting. Okay, so I have a question about that, too. Okay, so let's just. I'll just do this again. How has your great grandmother's collection of letters shaped your understanding of the Holocaust compared to what you've learned at university? Okay. And then I have another question for you, Max. Do you So I think David spoke about discovering how when he went to the museum, the Holocaust Museum that you are referred to as a first generation survivor. And what is interesting is in my exploration of memoir literature, I noticed a certain pattern in the way in the themes that are explored by, say, the survivors, the first generation survivors, the second generation survivors, the third generation, and so on and so forth. And what is interesting is that the themes that are discussed by all of these generations, of course, are different. So they are very relevant. Two to even Max. I mean, Max, you just spoke about, you know, how the Holocaust is very far away in the past, but you still feel a connect. And as we know, we speak very often about intergenerational trauma. We speak about half trauma passed down through generations. And, of course, you know, the memory of the Holocaust is also important. So even in the context of you being a third generation survivor, there is a whole drawer and there's a whole panoply of literature of books and memoirs out there on the stories or the accounts told by third generation survivors that the themes of course, change the change through time. You know, the interests are different. So I have a question to ask you. Do you see any lessons in your great grandmother's collection that feel relevant to today's world or your own life? I mean, I, I think the biggest takeaway is the amount of hope that my family had even when they were in the ghetto. When you read the letters, there's just this this sense of like we have people in America, we have people who are going to survive and get through this and carry on the family and I think that's really important. I've been reading a lot of of memoirs from this time, and I think there's I see a big difference between optimism and hope, where optimism you're looking at the what's going on around you and hope is looking towards the future. And I think my family in Poland had a whole lot of hope that my great grandparents were going to rebuild the family, and that's exactly what they did. And so me as a third generation survivor, and I'm a product of that hope and and of that rebuilding that happened, my great grandparents came to America and it was just them. And there's a great quote. It's it's from the two of us came to this big family and. I'm very much a part of that. And I think me and all of my cousins feel the same way. We have that same connection to the family, which is that hope of our of our relatives who were lost in the Holocaust. Thank you. Thank you, Max. I turn to David now, in what ways have you ensured that your mother's experiences and the content of this book are preserved and honored within? Well, I think Max's mother and I put the book together. I did. I got all the translations done, but I didn't know how to do it, put it together in in a form that was at least a perusable And I think that the, the, the, the intensity with which my parents, especially my mother, pursued the hope and the and the dreams of coming to the United States was the thing that kept them alive during the war. They couldn't get to their parents. They couldn't have a discussion with them. There was no Internet. There was no well, there was a long distance phone, but it was almost impossible to afford. And so that's how they did it. And there's many a letter from her. There's one that I'll quote is when they found out my mother was pregnant with me is you have to know one little story before and I won't go into that. There's a whole bunch of stories related to her early life that are very fascinating. But she was raised because her mother had to be in Crimea where the weather was warm. And they thought that that helped you get better from the TV and so on. And so here's a postcard to my mother. We're so ecstatic about how you're going to have a grandchild for us. And they used my name is David Mordecai and so on and so forth. And so there's one letter where her mother is riding her and says.“Eat well, don't don't worry about food.” And she says, “Be sure to take your vitamins”, which I couldn't believe that.“And eat fruit. Fruit is good for you. Do they have fruit in the United States?” And that was that was I think that was more personality from her mother to her and from her to my sisters. The I can track that, let's put it that way. Thank you. Juli do have you come across other instances where you you where other families have engaged in the same act of compiling the letters or sort of like any memories. Might be. Open to everyone? Yeah, it's very strange. I don't know if it's very strange, but my very my very best friend, who I grew up with in St Louis, when her grandmother died, her mother found a shoebox full of letters. Also, there were even more. There's probably 100 in our collection, and they probably have almost 250. And her family wasn't from Poland, they were from Germany. And they had them translated and it was this of a very strangely similar experience that we were learning about our great grandparents and their families, their stories of of World War Two at the same time, and trying to put together these people who we didn't know but whose stories were very emotional in these letters. But also, like my dad said, there's there seems to be some holding back like they were they were almost censoring themselves, I think, a little bit in the letters. Anyway, So my best friend also had this from growing up, had the same experience of finding out about her family and and the few survivors who who made it here had these letters from the people who didn't make it. I am just thinking about, you know, we all knew when we produce any tapes, we tend to censor ourselves. We get a lot of what we've written because we we feel that suddenly certain things should not be mentioned. And I'm just curious, because we've spoken a lot about what was going on in the background and how that was sort of like disguised. And there was a certain, you know, different there was a different image being portrayed, of course. And yeah, I think we've already touched on that. But is there anything you'd like to I. I think one thing is that at least in our letters and I think I know who she's talking about. Yeah, they always, they say we are fine, everything is good. We have a place to live, we have enough food and I don't know that that's really true because, you know, they had no jobs. They had nothing to pay for anything with. And how could that be? There are some unexplained things that like there's some references in the letters in my mother's family where my grandfather, my mother's father went back and forth between Łomża and the ghetto and I don't know how he did that. There's one where the my grandmother, Rose, says, your grandma or your father will be back for Shabbos this weekend. How did he do that? Did he bribe people? They had a business that was a very good business and in the town of Łomża But I don't know. There's there's no way. Everything was always. Fine. So have you tried to has anyone even Max? I mean, that would be a very interesting area of research. You know, Have you tried to find out, for instance, the historical facts of those times about that particular area and any sort of accounts about what was really going on that you could then compliment with all the letters that you found? And of course, as I said, what was not been mentioned the unsaid in these letters. I think I can give you two stories. The first one is a thing called the ghetto bench, and it was the inciting cause of my father and mother to come to the United States. My father couldn't get his license to practice medicine because of being Jewish, and he decided to go to Vilna, to the university. There called Stefan Batory at the University of Vilna that still exists. And I have his student card. They saved everything, which is I have a little treasure trove of these things. And his reference to me was“I went to Vilna, to the university to get training and maybe become a teacher or professor. But when I got there, I saw Jews being beaten on the steps of the university” and I can date that there was a riot January 27th, I think over a thing called ghetto benches where they tried to make benches in the back or any Jew, any Gypsy, a Jehovah's Witness, anybody that they didn't like, they would make them sit on those benches and they weren't allowed to participate in class. They could listen, but they could not participate. And then they tried to expel all of the Jews. And the president of the university in Vilna refused to do it. And the students rioted and there was the Pogrom And that was sort of the inciting cause. My father never told me that story. He told me that when I saw Jews being beaten on the steps of the school where people should be educated, I decided that was it. I'm not going to stay. There was another one I want to tell you. I've forgotten it now. It'll come up. My brain works that way. When you do remember, just interrupt me any time. And then I think, Well, there's one question, of course. I mean, this is probably a what made Juli and I start like I think the time when I came to see you, Julie, at home last December. We spoke about that, I think, in detail. And that's very crucial to our program today, which is you all went on a trip to Poland and I want to talk about that. I want to I want to know how all of you felt. Max, did you go as well? I mean. Yes, I did. Yes. I do want to hear from all of you, Gail. I want to hear from you to please tell me your experience, because I I sensed very different emotions throughout in terms of what I watched of that trip on the view that you sent to me. And I also heard one or two of the audio recordings that you recorded when you were there. So, yes, I would like to know that these training, I would like to would like to answer the question. Okay. So I was I was brought up in a lovely, lovely, lovely home and my dad was he. Does a thread. Listening, This is the man. And he sort it was an inventor. He was an inventor. He said, okay, if we just move the camera a little bit on you, would you be just. A. Thank you. Thank you. And could you start again, please? I'm sorry. You know, that's not have a good. Yeah. So we had a good family in my house and a home and we played with each other, with our family and that was always good. And and we really. Got it on the trip. So. Right. So David is saying that I was right. You got of look. Okay. That's the point was that they everybody was going to Israel, not Israel. But well I'll give her story because she was center girl. She was with me on the 25th, our 25th anniversary trip when we discovered my father's house. But Gail was so taken with that and said she didn't want to go back. Yeah. And so I did. And so she didn't go on the second trip. I didn't. I didn't want to go to outfits. I just couldn't do it. Yeah. And the children and and the children were quite I think they were just fabulous. Fabulous. And but they didn't I don't think they felt how I felt about going into the. All right. I'll sort of tell you my viewpoint on it and how this the generation of it is that one of the things I wanted to do as carrying forward the the memorial, or if you want to use that word of my parents and our family was that I wanted everybody in the family to know what they had gone through because I was the only one that was collecting it. And I had one sister that physically couldn't do the trip, but the other sister went with us, along with her husband and her children, and we met a cousin that we discovered like three months before we left who says, my gosh, I'd love to do that. Can I meet you in Warsaw? And his name was Arthur Berwald And by golly, there he was when we got to Warsaw and he went on the trip with us. So this was sort of a knowledge trip that we wanted, our trip that I wanted our family and our children to have. And so I said, I don't care what it costs, I'm going to take everybody that wants to go. And so everybody but I guess everybody with Daniel went, Daniel, Sam. And so we had we had 19 people on the tour and I think it was very worthwhile because of the things that happened on the tour. And I don't know if you want to go over that separately or not. It's up to you. I'm very open to anything people. Well, I think there were a number of incidents on the trip and if anybody wants to add, please to Juli and Max is when we got to Poland, we met the young lady who was going to be our guide, and they had a van us. And I think it was one of the best trips I ever took in terms of accomplishing what you wanted to. And there were several things that just blew us away. And I think you've seen one of them as when we came Raczki and to show you how the interpretation of things is different. When we got Raczki, we got off the bus and there was a guide and another man who was a town historian, and they met us there and he said, and I brought some memorabilia and some pictures of the town and saw that my parents had brought. And the guy comes up to me and he says, Welcome to Raczki, and it's in the Suwałki District and so on and so forth. And have you seen, your father's factory. And I said, What are you talking about? They had a. farm. And the farm they lost the farm after, World War One, and moved into town. Well, I didn't know because my father never mentioned it, that his father, my grandfather, he and another family member and a friend and his best friend all had started a cloth factory and the building still existed in Raczki was the cultural center. They had a dance studio and they had computers. It's like, I guess it's it was like I was otherworldly and I never knew any of these things. My father told me we sold cloth. That was all he told then that the culmination of after we toured the town, we saw where the synagogue had been had been destroyed by the Nazis and where the cemetery had been. There was maybe one or two headstones left and the kids were very interested in that. And then we came back and we had this Silberstein installation. It's one of the few that are in Poland, and there's little brass plaques that are installed in front of the house where the person who was killed in the where they lived and the artist comes in and stalls and afterwards the entire town dances. Hora with us, I don't know if you know, it's Hebrew dance and so on and so forth. And it was just like, What is this going on? This is absolutely I could not understand it. It was like I did it. And to this day it's like, how did this happen? Well, the town was supportive of someone coming back. It's a little farm town. And they were there. There were 30 people dancing with. And so those are some of the things that we took. And then many other things like the visit to Auschwitz was really something to the. See, I can't do that. I couldn't do that. I couldn't do. It. And my mother's home town was a larger town. So we her house was destroyed and her family business was destroyed. But they took us to the exact spot where the house was So we installed some stones there to and the town welcomed us. We went to the cemetery and so on. This was all way beyond what I thought we could accomplish. I think all the children, they remember this now. And, you know, you look through the book of our trip and all the pictures and it gives a little bit of depth to our family. And that's what I wanted to accomplish. I think what struck me, because I watched that video a few times, is really that image of when you are putting the stones, and I still have that, which is very vivid. Do I have your permission to play that little excerpt of the video just which is credited at the end of the program. Something. Sure. Yeah. Sure didn't like to be there. I think it would be very nice to have that. I would love to hear from Juli from from Max, you know, about your experience as well, because I think you've all had different experiences of that trip. And that's a very big sort of like in terms of just Holocaust studies, genocide studies in general. I think we very often emphasize the importance of memorializing, right? So this was an act of memorializing that, that even. Yes, it was. Of what would ever happen in the family. And I think it's also, you know, the act of that act itself has very many benefits to the whole family. And I want you to speak about that In your experience, if it's possible. So, we had someone who was leading us and and I was here and David wanted to go into Dad's. yeah, that's the other. I was. In the first trip this was in the first trip that just went. Yeah. Yeah. So, so who was it was it. There were let's see, I would say there were five men on the stoops, Stoops valley in suits. And, and so David wanted to know where the house was. And so I said it's over there. And so that was okay. And then we. Well, the point. You want to make. Yes. Okay. The point is, you say. That she took a picture of us and the women. Were. Pointing down the street. It's diagonally on the town square to the house and. Gail says that the thought crossed your mind at that moment, that, wow, that's what they did when they when the Nazis came in and they wanted to know where the Jews were and they were pointed out, and it's probably true. Yeah, that that is to me, I. Thought I will. Say I did my chest all the time. Yeah. I will say that was the other thing I'll tell you is that when the first time when we went there the the house was a store like a hardware store or something and my dad, this is a family, something that my dad respected his grandmother, meaning Mordechai’s wife. Her name was Bryna, and he respected her. He says she was the brains of the family and he respected her and thought of her as important person. And he says she slept in the living room next to a tile stove because that was the warmest room in the house. And I walked into the building that had been pointed out to us. And this is the one that first struck that. And there in the corner was a brown tile stove. And I said, my God, this is the clue. I break up it. This is the closest I'll ever get to my grandparents and and my great grandparents. And so that's where our family starts from that time also. So that was the other one I wanted to tell you. Thank you, David. So I'm also curious to hear from Julie and Max about. Yeah. Check. I guess I'll go and then we'll go in order. I'll say this I was nervous about going on the trip. I the Holocaust and. The stories have always been something that I have not embraced and I felt very nervous about. I did not want to go to Auschwitz either, like my Mom said, but my grandparents were so dear to me and I love talking to them about their childhood. The old I loved, I loved when they spoke in different languages. I loved my grandfather telling Bible stories. We would sleep over at their house on Friday when I was younger. Every Friday night we'd have Shabbat dinner with them and then I would sleep over and hearing the stories from their past was something I loved dearly. And so I wanted to go on the trip more to find those connections, then to connect with the scarier parts of their story, which were the yeah, the genocide part. And and I really even made a huge excuse not to go to Auschwitz, which was part of our trip, because I, I thought my daughter was too young and I didn't think she should go. But my daughter said, no, I can handle it. And so then I did have an excuse and I had to go. And I will say that walking through their camp and being with my family to do it was transformative. And I've come out of that feeling like, everybody should go to Auschwitz. Everyone in the whole world should walk through that camp, should through those gates, should should experience it and should should somehow internalize it in a way. And there was something about the reality of it that was more powerful than that, the imagination of it in a way that made me able to handle it. So I don't know if that makes any sense because it was horrible. But and, and I think it's really important. It was an important part of that trip that the end of the Auschwitz there's a room where there's a book that's six feet long. Maybe it takes up the whole room. I don't know if you've been there, but it's the names of everybody who was killed in the Holocaust. And so you can alphabetically go through it and you can. We found the page of the Berwalds. And seeing those names, I don't know why, but like it was something made me I was it made it real in a way that was really important. It's been important to me in my internalization of what happened to our family. I don't want to say it was healing, but there was something memorializing about it that made it powerful. That was one thing. Also, the going back to the Villages was amazing. I remember my grandma made all these pies all the time out of fruit and that village was literally in fruit. Fruit was falling off the trees. There were apples everywhere. Things. Yeah, peaches. I don't know. There was fruit all over that town. And I'm like, well, no wonder she baked with fruit all the time. And, and I and then we are seeing this the stones in the forest, the cemetery stones, and kind of noticing that the trees were 70 years old around the stones really felt like also an important thing to to witness. And then the dancing was I don't think any of us will ever forget that feeling of just holding hands with the people in this village and and dancing with them. And there was something someone said to me and one of the story and said, and my dad doesn't remember this, but a lot of historians said that it's possible that there were Berwalds in this village Raczki for 400 years. And to have. I. I, I can't because we are in this country for such a short time to think we were in somewhere else for such a long time made me feel connected to this planet. I guess in a longer, a more and an older way than I had felt before. I had gone to Poland. So it's those are sort of some of the top, top moments of that trip. Thank you. Thank you, Judy. Next Yeah, So I think my generation had a very different take on it, just because we don't have that connection to to to the to the great grandparents, to the people who actually lived there just because of our age. And I mean, I was 16 when we went. I didn't have that creative abyss of what actually happened. But the context about a lot of the things that I'm aware of now. But I really I think the biggest takeaway for me is what you call the third generation survivor, is that I was there with my family and my I was just looking through my roll and I have these videos of my of my grandfather, David, talking, giving me a tour of the village. And I think if if I lost like my entire camera roll, but that's it, I would be happy because it just shows how important it is that I have this connection between me, my parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents. And maybe 400 years before that's connected to this place that I don't even I didn't even know existed before we went there. And I just think being able to go there with my family was the most powerful part of this trip. I don't want to say that we were reclaiming the space because I don't think we were there to reclaim. We were there to memorialize. We were there to say, you know, look at what was lost, look at what has grown from that loss. And we were able to go back and really and really just cherish our lives as a whole. And I got a whole new appreciation for for just the the how our family works together and and how close we are. And I'm going back to Poland in May for part of this program I'm doing this semester, and I think it's going to be a very, very different experience in this one because not going with my family, I'm going with a more academic bend So it'll be interesting to go is I'm the only Jew in this program too. So that also gives me a different perspective. But I do think going as our family as to who we are today is that that was really powerful. It was definitely the most moving part of the trip. Thank you. Is there do you have a copy of the book of the Letters with me? Not with me, but I do have one. Yeah. My my grandfather gave every single one of the grandkids a book. Yeah. No, I was just hoping if you wanted to read like anything from it that. Was the one. The one that I would have read was when they found out that my grandfather was born, that I think my, my actually read about at the beginning of the program. I just think it's that letter for me. It just shows the connection, the direct connection between me to my grandfather, to my my family, who perished during the Holocaust, and them knowing that there is a future, there is going to be multiple generations in America that will continue on the family in some form. And so that for me was sort of the most powerful part, my favorite part of the book. I think it's in it it's it's from December, January 19 two, 1941. I think they said, David. Wait, hang on. Yeah, I read the one from Vienna, which is my grandfather. I think there's another one that. Yeah, I probably should read that one. Yes. He really great way of like facing everything. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. Let's see. I want the one with the chicken is like the best one. There are a couple here. I think it was the one at the big conference February 14th. Was that the one where they said they got a picture of Poppy? Yeah, I think so. A couple here. Hang on. Let me. I have it. Actually, I have it bookmarked, I think, in your book. do you want let me just. Read. I can read you this one and even this one. This one is from February. Okay. So and it's from, Yeah, this is the first record. Dad. I think the one from February, February 20th is the best one. Look at that. That's the one where it says, I'm happy you're breastfeeding. Really? yeah. Your mother and grandmother. Well, I wanted to. Look. Much loved the darling children find you and Israel. Mazel tov. Mazel talk. Mazel tov. May it be with great, good fortune. May you be happy parents. I get much joy. And not just from your lovable son. We just now got your postcard of December 23rd. We are filled with joy. Thank God that everything transpired easily and well. Like we to God for the whole time made everything go well for you. From now on, my dearest children, as we wish for you with all our hearts. How are you now, my darling daughter? How is your dear grandchild? May you all be will live happily and blessed as we wish for enough love my daughter. How have you been managing? Who helps you? If only we could help Medicare. Susan wishes you all the best. Write us detailed letters. Dear children, you're eternally faithful and devoted. Mother and grandmother and that was. That was the feel good part. That they never broke, that, you know, that we don't have food here. And you know this was the the ghetto was destroyed in the late 19th and mid 1941 and destroyed completely burned to the ground in the spring of 42. May killed 25,000 people there. Now. Julie, sorry, Do you want to read out something or shall we? I have I have just a last, but it's really up to you. Yeah, I. Think that's good. No, I think it's actually nice in my dad's voice, too. Okay. Yes, I think what your dad. What David read up is beautiful. I think so. A general question. I mean. Well, I have two questions, but the first. Okay, hit the first one. How do you feel about sharing this collection of letters that you have all compiled with a wider audience, potentially potentially impacting how others Holocaust history? I would love for that to happen, but I don't know how to make it happen. I, Juli and Lynn, Max's mother, essentially helped me to put this together. I will say that at the present time, still, I can't. The Holocaust Museum in Washington wants this stuff that I have. I have their green cards. I have the my dad's student cards, ID cards from France, Switzerland and Italy. And and and the one from Vilna that I mentioned before. And I have all these pictures which I've shared with the Holocaust Museum and Saint Louis, but the one in Washington that wanted me to donate the whole thing. And I can't do that. Juli's friends and they're good friends of mine because I went to high school with the mother's father and I'm sorry, with the mother's husband. He and I went to high school together, but in any case, they donated their whole trove of letters. But this is all I have. I have more. We have no souvenirs. We have no nothing other than these papers. And maybe a few and little items, one of which I did donate. And it was a wicker basket that mother brought her to. Sew. Weeping and what she called Joy. Trip. So she called it her. Trousseau to the United States. And I donated that to the Saint Louis Holocaust Museum. And so that's where we're at on this. And but I would be more than happy to publish the book more formally. I say there's a few little things that we could, but we basically put it together with the letter on one page and the translation on the next. And it takes time. It takes a lot of time and effort, but I'm willing to do it. Thank you. Max. Do you have such, such a plan? Do you have a plan to do something with this collection? I mean, the question that we always ask is, is historians and people considering these primary documents just like what makes them stand out, what makes them special? And I mean, I think coupling these documents with our trip and the intergenerational impact of these documents and the subsequent trip is what makes this makes everything special, in my opinion. I mean, as a student, I would love to do something with these documents. I would love to sort of reconstruct it in a way that I could pull out a couple of themes, a couple takeaways. But I do think that looking at these documents, a correspondence between people who were in a ghetto and people who were living comfortably in America is is is powerful for people learning about the Holocaust because it shows a whole new dimension. You read a lot about people who are physically in the Holocaust, but I don't think there's a whole lot about people who have escaped but still have family that are in Europe. And they're also getting this second hand information, maybe even guilt from like a survivor's guilt of what's happening. And I think the survivor's guilt was a big thing in our family. My grandfather talks a lot about silence around these letters, not translating them. And I think that's a big psychological aspect. But I just think that these these documents to highlight this a whole a whole different side of the Holocaust that people don't really talk about, which is like the splitting of families. And it does it at least for for me, it makes me more appreciative of the reason that I'm here today and how lucky I am to have these remnants of my family. And and perhaps it's something that is extraordinary. After excuse me for just a minute. I'm going to run the bathroom right. So the listeners are listening to what my grandchild. I am really impressed, Max, with you. I am to. Add, I am. I just. I just love listening to you. You are so considerate of other people. And and it's just fascinating to so to listen to you and your voice. Thank you. And I think I think what is interesting is how, Max, you seem to be basically highlighting all the main points in this process of figuring out how to work, for instance, towards, as I said, memorializing this collection letters. And you are right to say that I was reading a paper by the what is it called? It's called the Montreal anything. It's called the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. MIGS. And they published a paper on unpublished Holocaust memoirs. And this book is about the fact that, you know, the analyzed in the a few of the Holocaust memoirs where it were analyzed, those that were unpublished, as I said, it range from like 10 to 15 pages to a whole book. And of course, we would be curious to know why they were not published. And of course, one of the reasons one of the reasons given was that, you know, these these memoirs were not publication worthy because they didn't conform to certain rules, which Juli you know very well. Every publishing industry has its own rules. In fact, we also knew that some of the canonical writers such as Primo Levi, Primo, Primo, Levi, Elie Wiesel, Elie Wiesel, actually even their works were rejected when they were sent for publication, including Otto Frank, who's the father of and Frank. All the works were actually rejected by the publishers because they just didn't appeal to the to the demand to demand out there. And, you know that the publishing industry is very much fake to the demands of writers and the themes that they want to read at that particular time. So I think Max just listening to you. Sort of makes me realize how you're very aware of the demands of the industry and you're aware that you have to conform to some of their demands for your work to be there and for it to be published. And you're very right. I think you have been able to highlight even the the crucial, distinctive factor about this collection, which is it's an account telling the experience of those who've managed to escape. And you rightly pointed out that word, you know, which is luck, right? Lucky You know, you feel lucky because a lot of the survivors who write about their experiences, those who escaped that possibility, they speak about where they ask themselves this question, how did I get to where and not the person next to me? And sometimes that selection or that attraction based on just simple luck, someone had had the mind to walk away, to get up, to just do the right thing and get away from a tragic experience. So yes, it was a big word. And yeah. I wanted to end. I wanted to I wanted to add two things. One, just about what you were just talking about in this Survivor first generation survivor group that I've been going to. The meetings there was we were each telling our stories and we just a little blurbs from it. And this one guy got up and said that his family had survived because when his mother and father were in line for the train, some man walked up behind his father and said don't get on the train, get on the truck. That's all he said. And the man that took that got on the truck went to a slave labor camp, escape from there. And the family survived. And then I wanted to add one last thing. This is from my father to you and to. Our. Family, because I've that so many times is that I once was just chatting with him and he said, you know, I really don't regret any of the things I did in my life. I regret the things I didn't do. And that was the way I felt about this trip. Everybody said, Why are you taking everybody? I said, Because I want to. It's the right thing to do and I want to do it. And so that I'll leave that with you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I had there were many powerful moments and this is I'm off of you know, I'm not speaking. I'm going to be recording this, but I'm just saying that and, you know, there were many powerful moments where there were many goosebumps moments in this conversation. And you also make a wonderful family. Feel lucky about that. Yeah, we do. We did, for sure. Sure. I'm very proud of our family. But I don't know, I think. Know. I have to look at Julie's very extended biography on Wikipedia as well, and it's very, very. That's where the textbook stuff came from. And did you need to edit it? I need to edit it. Yeah, I. Will. Well, thank you for listening to us. I think we're all very grateful to to that you're interested in the story. We're also grateful for the work you do around genocide and, and, and trying to tell these stories. It's, it's, it's so important. So thank you for that. And I will go and send you links to those to this. And Abby just like to me a confirmation also that if you're okay with the whole family, just having snippets of that, the video, if you could ask them, because I think they appear in the video. the rest of the people from the. Yeah. But so I know since there's so many people I will not with the bits I do want to do I do I do want to put the dance, you know that was just to me and just maybe a few seconds of the dance and you're all family members. It shouldn't be a problem. Well, there. Were village people in it, too. Yeah. So you don't know who they are. Right? Well, let me see if my You know what? It was filmed for the news. It was on the news also. So the rights are with you. The rights for that original that. Yeah, that video came from Lori. Yeah, I think I think that was the news broadcast for the next day that someone out of town visitors had come the the village is a farm village and a small town. At one time it was 60% Jewish, but that was in the 1800s. But the the the county main seat. And if you want to try and find it, there is a really fascinating movie that was made in 1937 and it was made by a man from Chicago and it's called that which will be no more, I think is what it was called. And it was essentially a trip he took with a camera in 1937. And it is in Souvlaki and Filipov and it doesn't show rats, but Filipov and Roths were like sister cities about six miles out of town from Suvorov. And it has some fabulous pictures of movies of the marketplace and of the synagogue that was a giant synagogue and survived. And all that's gone. The last Jew in survival died maybe ten years ago. But I'll. You know. Laurie made that video, so I'll just I think if she gives permission, it will probably suffice for a lot. So I'll get I'll get I'll ask Laurie. And if you could also send me the audio recordings, like if we could find out, I mean, we have a lot of sort of like primary material. You know, I read the I mean, sorry, the letters. We have you reading it and then we've got that the video footage. So I think we do have a lot of material. Ever you come across anything that audio recording because have about I plan to do broadcasts on the well next weekend. my gosh. Yeah a lot of word. Quite quickly so my producer if I get any questions my producer will be so like you said, you'd be in touch with you, a copy copy you on email so that you can connect with him. But I think just permission for the video footage for now would be okay. All right. I'll I'll touch base with Lori about that. Fantastic. So thank you so much and thanks for your time. This was your time, too. Juli Berwald is an ocean scientist and science writer based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the Science Memoir and ten science Textbooks. And her magazine length pieces have appeared in The New York Times and National Geographic, among other publications. The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone was published by Penguin Random House, and in 2022, her Life on the Rocks building a future for coral reefs was published by the same organization we are here today to speak with her, as well as a father David and mother Gail and her nephew Max on a very different subject, which we’ll begin with a reading of an excerpt from a diary. But before we do that, Juli would you like to tell us a little bit about this diary and about the genesis, about the reason why there was a compilation of this diary by your family? Yeah, I guess I would call it. It's more of a collection of letters than a diary. And my dad can talk about it in more detail. But basically my father's parents were the only ones of their family to survive the invasion of Poland and the subsequent Holocaust. And my dad grew up, he often says, without knowing much about his grandparents and but after his mother died, that's my grandmother in the bottom of the China cabinet. My dad discovered around 100 letters, and those letters had been written from my grandparents family to my grandparents. After my grandparents came here in 1938, the letters were written in multiple languages. they were in Russian. They were a lot were in Yiddish, a couple were in Italian. They were a lot of languages. And so it took a long time. And I think my dad can speak to this more to get them translated. But ultimately he did and compiled them into a book. And so the excerpt I want to read, which I haven't talked to my dad about yet, is from this from February 12th, 1941. It is the I think one of the big question marks my dad always had was whether or not his grandparents knew he had been born. And this letter was proof that they did know that my dad had arrived in the world. it goes Dear Israel. Israel was my grandfather's name, Dear Israel. Yesterday I got the happy news about your newborn son. I wish you a lot of happy moments and long years with your son. Finally, after such a long wait, I'm very happy. The only problem is I cannot see the child. It has been a long time since I got any information from you that can be explained by the fact that you forgot our address. But I hope this is not the case. How is Vanya doing? Vanya was my grandmother. Manya cannot write because her eyesight recently has been bad. Her eyes are watering all the time. Recently, Mamma is not feeling very well, but there is nothing we can do about it. Maybe it will get better in the future. Write to us more often. Margolis got some beautiful clothing. It was sent three months ago. I wish you a lot of help and health and happiness Minna and Minna was my grandfather's sister and my middle name is Minette. I was named after her, so she knew that my dad had been born. too. David. Would you like to tell us what you feel about this extract and what sort of emotions it stirred in you? Well, I yeah, I think that what I was looking for in the in the letters, which is sort of my mother was sort of a pack rat just like I was. I am. And we didn't know I knew that she had some letters because I had seen a scatter scattering of them over the years. But she had a drawer on that kind of cabinet that she threw birthday cards and stuff into. And so I'm going through birthday cards with every person they ever knew. And all of a sudden I start finding these letters. Some were folded up. Most of them were postcards. And as Juli said, we found those appreciable number. Plus I found a whole load of letters, about 40 that had been written by my mother to my father in 1938, the year that they came to the United States. And those were all in Polish. And the reason for those letters is that my father's uncle brought the two of them to the United States under his sponsorship in 1938. There was very few Jews that were allowed to come to the United States. I think the entire country had 20,000 immigrants, and that's it for the whole year of 38 and 39. But anyway, the dad's uncle had shipped my mother down to Houston with some other family. She had never experienced weather like they have in Houston with the humidity and the heat and so on. She came from a northern country and so most of these letters detailed things that she did with this Aunt Rachel, who lived in Houston and the rest of the Berwald. I never met them. They never took us down to Houston or Dallas. I've resurrected a lot of these friends since I started looking into his genealogy to sort of finish that little story. We had a pathologist at my hospital where I was a surgeon who was from Poland, and I brought the letters to him and we would come once a week and he would translate. And he I'll never forget he made a cute saying. He says, These are your parents, you know, personal thoughts. Are you sure you want me? I said, That's all I have. I have got to have it. So he and I would scribe and he would translate the letters for me. And there was one actually that Juli did was an Italian, because my father had some of his training in Italy, knew nine languages, and then the rest was a real problem because they were all written in script Yiddish. And it's not print Hebrew, it's looks like chicken scratch, But that's what they were written it and I couldn't find. Everybody would tell me, yes, I know Polish. I mean, I know Yiddish. But they didn't and they didn't know how to do a script. Yiddish did never translated any of these letters. So I ended up going through YIVO, which is the Yiddish preservation organization in New York, and they got me a translator and it was not cheap, but I really didn't care. And we got all the letters translated. So that's the genesis of the book. It's very interesting that you say that because in my study of memoir literature of the Holocaust, what I found out was that although many scholars see today that that period post-Holocaust was silent, there were no publications perceived from survivors. And there are other scholars who've come in to contradict that statement and say there were tons people wanted to write about the experiences, but unfortunately there was a problem of language. Basically, all of these memos were in Yiddish and therefore not accessible to the English speaking world. So it's interesting that Juli now David just mentioned that you translated that letters, that letter which was in Italian, the Italian parts of the book today. I'm curious. I mean, you're a writer. I'm a writer too. And I know that sometimes we do engage in some translation work, but if we are to translate a letter or something as precious as this letter that you were translating, I'm curious to know whether you experienced anything different. What were your thoughts during that translation process? Well, my grandma was pretty miserable, so like, I think my dad's like she didn't like the weather. And the the truth is the the family that wasn't her family. It was my grandfather's family. They were horrible. They were not nice to her. I mean, I think that can be an experience of immigrants. And so and she thought that they were kind of kooky, like their behaviors were. So they were. One there was one person in the family who was. I don't think he was really maybe a great person. And so she was stuck with these people who weren't treating her great. She was sort of not loving. And so it was I, I mean, my grandma, like my dad said, was a big personality, but it made me she was she was, you know, in her twenties, late twenties when that was happening to her. And it helped me kind of connect with her in a way. I mean, I could put myself in her position and sort of understand why she was writing. And it was very honest. She was very honest with my grandfather. I'll throw in here, yeah, that there's one letter in which she was she writes, We are always so friendly and good when we are apart like this. How come we argue when I come home? Well, that was that letter, Dad. That was the Italian, right? And it's funny because they did. They fought like they fought like crazy. And they they insulted each other in different languages because they spoke so many because they'd had to move all over Europe for my grandfather to come get his education because of the anti-Semitism. But, you know, there was true there was love between them even though they they they fought it was kind of part of the relationship. And I think that's one thing like one thing that persecution can do is it can reduce the humanity of people to the numbers and and and to the the the idea of being persecuted. But like these letters reveal personality, which is humanity. And that's like what I find so important about them. Now obviously our audience doesn't know about the contents of this book, this collection of letters. I'm curious to hear what marked the three or four of you, rather, in, you know, when you perused the collection, what were the bits that you would like to discuss in terms of the persecution that we were experiencing and how was it approached? You know, in those times. I think that I'm going to change one word that she used and that is persecution. I think it was this is what happened and that was the way they viewed it. They I, I keep getting a feeling that there was a lot more going on in the day to day living like they were in a ghetto and in Belarus called Słonim and the Słonim ghetto had 25,000 people in it. And as far as we know, that's where they died. There was no trains, there was nothing taking them to Auschwitz or Birkenau or any of that. They did mention that it was hard to get things, you know, and they were very specific about saying, send us that. And they would they wanted to try and get better things. My mother's family, I think, was more well-to-do than my father was family, although that's maybe not quite true, I'm not sure. But I know, for example, this is there's one or two examples of it just blow me away is the ghetto was destroyed by the Einsatzgruppen, which was the murder squads from. And yet we got a postcard that is dated June 22nd or third, and the Einsatzgruppen came in and started liquidating the ghetto. On June 27. We still got a postcard from and that's the last postcard we got. But how did that happen? How did normal everyday things happen? And, they, the two families, would get together every week and they would have dinner together or Shabbos together. And Juli mentioned the the thing where they they killed a chicken and had a big meal celebrating my birth. So that and Dan's father would write these letters like we've had a difficult time but we've come out the other end and things will get better now and he also statements that after the invasion in 39 that they ran away to a town which I've been through and it's only ten miles away, but it was on the other side of the border. And so the Russians took it over and they he said the Russians were pretty nice to them And and his brother, my dad's brother had a job as a I don't know what a clerk or something like that. Those are things that they tried to make it sound as if they were doing all right. But there's an undercurrent in the letters that it wasn't. All right. You know, my dad tried to send them wool blankets and and some cloth, and I can't remember now whether they ever got it or not. But they and I, I did not find any evidence like the joint distribution committee would transfer money, but I don't know that they ever got any packages from Dad. They would beg for these things in the letters, but they didn't get very much. Thank you. Thanks for sharing this, Max. I have a question for you. How has your great grandmother's collection of letters shaped your understanding of the Holocaust compared to what you've learned at university? Yeah, I mean, I, I do have a particular interest in this area of history. It's something that I feel is very much in my blood. It's part of my heritage. And I think reading some of the letters about the the ghettos and how my family actually lived that experience compared with reading other people's diaries, reading other memoirs from people in other ghettos gives me this sense of connection and this deeper understanding of what happened. And so I think these letters have really have really sparked an interest, not just academically, but also emotionally. For me, just because I have I have, you know, all of these people that went through this experience, unlike some of my other classmates. And so I really do feel like I have a very different view of all of these events because I have these letters, because I have these personal primary documents, if that's what we can call them. And I think it's really interesting that I can draw upon the experiences of my own family rather than someone else who, you know, has been published and might seem very far off and academic. Where it's this source is something that's very close to me and it's very much a part of me as a person. I think David spoke about discovering how when he went to the museum, the Holocaust Museum that you are referred to as a first generation survivor. And what is interesting is in my exploration of memoir literature, I noticed a certain pattern in the way in the themes that are explored by, say, the survivors, the first generation survivors, the second generation survivors, the third generation, and so on and so forth. And what is interesting is that the themes that are discussed by all of these generations, of course, are different. So they are very relevant. Two to even Max. I mean, Max, you just spoke about, you know, how the Holocaust is very far away in the past, but you still feel a connect. And as we know, we speak very often about intergenerational trauma. We speak about half trauma passed down through generations. And, of course, you know, the memory of the Holocaust is also important. So even in the context of you being a third generation survivor, there is a whole drawer and there's a whole panoply of literature of books and memoirs out there on the stories or the accounts told by third generation survivors that the themes of course, change the change through time. You know, the interests are different. So I have a question to ask you. Do you see any lessons in your great grandmother's collection that feel relevant to today's world or your own life? I mean, I, I think the biggest takeaway is the amount of hope that my family had even when they were in the ghetto. When you read the letters, there's just this this sense of like we have people in America, we have people who are going to survive and get through this and carry on the family and I think that's really important. I've been reading a lot of of memoirs from this time, and I think there's I see a big difference between optimism and hope, where optimism you're looking at the what's going on around you and hope is looking towards the future. And I think my family in Poland had a whole lot of hope that my great grandparents were going to rebuild the family, and that's exactly what they did. And so me as a third generation survivor, and I'm a product of that hope and and of that rebuilding that happened, my great grandparents came to America and it was just them. And there's a great quote. It's it's from the two of us came to this big family and. I'm very much a part of that. And I think me and all of my cousins feel the same way. We have that same connection to the family, which is that hope of our of our relatives who were lost in the Holocaust. Thank you. Thank you, Max. I turn to David now, in what ways have you ensured that your mother's experiences and the content of this book are preserved and honored within? Well, I think Max's mother and I put the book together. I did. I got all the translations done, but I didn't know how to do it, put it together in in a form that was at least a perusable And I think that the, the, the, the intensity with which my parents, especially my mother, pursued the hope and the and the dreams of coming to the United States was the thing that kept them alive during the war. They couldn't get to their parents. They couldn't have a discussion with them. There was no Internet. There was no well, there was a long distance phone, but it was almost impossible to afford. And so that's how they did it. And there's many a letter from her. There's one that I'll quote is when they found out my mother was pregnant with me is you have to know one little story before and I won't go into that. There's a whole bunch of stories related to her early life that are very fascinating. But she was raised because her mother had to be in Crimea where the weather was warm. And they thought that that helped you get better from the TV and so on. And so here's a postcard to my mother. We're so ecstatic about how you're going to have a grandchild for us. And they used my name is David Mordecai and so on and so forth. And so there's one letter where her mother is riding her and says.“Eat well, don't don't worry about food.” And she says, “Be sure to take your vitamins”, which I couldn't believe that.“And eat fruit. Fruit is good for you. Do they have fruit in the United States?” And that was that was I think that was more personality from her mother to her and from her to my sisters. The I can track that, let's put it that way. Juli do have you come across other instances where you you where other families have engaged in the same act of compiling the letters or sort of like any memories. Yeah, it's very strange. I don't know if it's very strange, but my very my very best friend, who I grew up with in St Louis, when her grandmother died, her mother found a shoebox full of letters. Also, there were even more. There's probably 100 in our collection, and they probably have almost 250. And her family wasn't from Poland, they were from Germany. And they had them translated and it was this of a very strangely similar experience that we were learning about our great grandparents and their families, their stories of of World War Two at the same time, and trying to put together these people who we didn't know but whose stories were very emotional in these letters. But also, like my dad said, there's there seems to be some holding back like they were they were almost censoring themselves, I think, a little bit in the letters. Anyway, So my best friend also had this from growing up, had the same experience of finding out about her family and and the few survivors who who made it here had these letters from the people who didn't make it. I am just thinking about, you know, we all knew when we produce any tapes, we tend to censor ourselves. We get a lot of what we've written because we we feel that suddenly certain things should not be mentioned. And I'm just curious, because we've spoken a lot about what was going on in the background and how that was sort of like disguised. And there was a certain, you know, different there was a different image being portrayed, of course. I think one thing is that at least in our letters and I think I know who she's talking about. Yeah, they always, they say we are fine, everything is good. We have a place to live, we have enough food and I don't know that that's really true because, you know, they had no jobs. They had nothing to pay for anything with. And how could that be? There are some unexplained things that like there's some references in the letters in my mother's family where my grandfather, my mother's father went back and forth between Łomża and the ghetto and I don't know how he did that. There's one where the my grandmother, Rose, says, your grandma or your father will be back for Shabbos this weekend. How did he do that? Did he bribe people? They had a business that was a very good business and in the town of Łomża But I don't know. There's there's no way. Everything was always. Fine. So have you tried to has anyone even Max? I mean, that would be a very interesting area of research. You know, Have you tried to find out, for instance, the historical facts of those times about that particular area and any sort of accounts about what was really going on that you could then compliment with all the letters that you found? And of course, as I said, what was not been mentioned the unsaid in these letters. I think I can give you two stories. The first one is a thing called the ghetto bench, and it was the inciting cause of my father and mother to come to the United States. My father couldn't get his license to practice medicine because of being Jewish, and he decided to go to Vilna, to the university. There called Stefan Batory at the University of Vilna that still exists. And I have his student card. They saved everything, which is I have a little treasure trove of these things. And his reference to me was “I went to Vilna, to the university to get training and maybe become a teacher or professor. But when I got there, I saw Jews being beaten on the steps of the university” and I can date that there was a riot January 27th, I think over a thing called ghetto benches where they tried to make benches in the back or any Jew, any Gypsy, a Jehovah's Witness, anybody that they didn't like, they would make them sit on those benches and they weren't allowed to participate in class. They could listen, but they could not participate. And then they tried to expel all of the Jews. And the president of the university in Vilna refused to do it. And the students rioted and there was the Pogrom And that was sort of the inciting cause. My father never told me that story. He told me that when I saw Jews being beaten on the steps of the school where people should be educated, I decided that was it. I'm not going to stay. there's one question, of course. I mean, this is probably a what made Juli and I start like I think the time when I came to see you, Julie, at home last December. We spoke about that, I think, in detail. And that's very crucial to our program today, which is you all went on a trip to Poland please tell me your experience, because I I sensed very different emotions throughout in terms of what I watched of that trip on the view that you sent to me. And I also heard one or two of the audio recordings that you recorded when you were there. So, yes, I would like to know that one of the things I wanted to do as carrying forward the the memorial, or if you want to use that word of my parents and our family was that I wanted everybody in the family to know what they had gone through because I was the only one that was collecting it. And I had one sister that physically couldn't do the trip, but the other sister went with us, along with her husband and her children, and we met a cousin that we discovered like three months before we left who says, my gosh, I'd love to do that. Can I meet you in Warsaw? And his name was Arthur Berwald And by golly, there he was when we got to Warsaw and he went on the trip with us. So this was sort of a knowledge trip that we wanted, our trip that I wanted our family and our children to have. And so I said, I don't care what it costs, I'm going to take everybody that wants to go. and I think it was very worthwhile because of the things that happened on the tour. there were a number of incidents on the trip and if anybody wants to add, please to Juli and Max is when we got to Poland, we met the young lady who was going to be our guide, and they had a van us. And I think it was one of the best trips I ever took in terms of accomplishing what you wanted to. And there were several things that just blew us away. And I think you've seen one of them as when we came Raczki and to show you how the interpretation of things is different. When we got Raczki, we got off the bus and there was a guide and another man who was a town historian, and they met us there and he said, and I brought some memorabilia and some pictures of the town and saw that my parents had brought. And the guy comes up to me and he says, Welcome to Raczki, and it's in the Suwałki District and so on and so forth. And have you seen, your father's factory. And I said, What are you talking about? They had a. farm. And the farm they lost the farm after, World War One, and moved into town. Well, I didn't know because my father never mentioned it, that his father, my grandfather, he and another family member and a friend and his best friend all had started a cloth factory and the building still existed in Raczki was the cultural center. They had a dance studio and they had computers. It's like, I guess it's it was like I was otherworldly and I never knew any of these things. My father told me we sold cloth. That was all he told then that the culmination of after we toured the town, we saw where the synagogue had been had been destroyed by the Nazis and where the cemetery had been. There was maybe one or two headstones left and the kids were very interested in that. And then we came back and we had this Silberstein installation. It's one of the few that are in Poland, and there's little brass plaques that are installed in front of the house where the person who was killed in the where they lived and the artist comes in and stalls and afterwards the entire town dances. Hora with us, I don't know if you know, it's Hebrew dance and so on and so forth. And it was just like, What is this going on? This is absolutely I could not understand it. It was like I did it. And to this day it's like, how did this happen? Well, the town was supportive of someone coming back. It's a little farm town. And they were there. There were 30 people dancing with. And so those are some of the things that we took. And then many other things like the visit to Auschwitz was really something my mother's home town was a larger town. So we her house was destroyed and her family business was destroyed. But they took us to the exact spot where the house was So we installed some stones there to and the town welcomed us. We went to the cemetery and so on. This was all way beyond what I thought we could accomplish. I think all the children, they remember this now. And, you know, you look through the book of our trip and all the pictures and it gives a little bit of depth to our family. And that's what I wanted to accomplish. I would love to hear from Juli from from Max, you know, about your experience as well, because I think you've all had different experiences of that trip. And that's a very big sort of like in terms of just Holocaust studies, genocide studies in general. I think we very often emphasize the importance of memorializing, right? So this was an act of memorializing Of what would ever happen in the family. And I think it's also, you know, the act of that act itself has very many benefits to the whole family. And I want you to speak about that In your experience, if it's possible. I'll say this I was nervous about going on the trip. I the Holocaust and. The stories have always been something that I have not embraced and I felt very nervous about. I did not want to go to Auschwitz either, like my Mom said, but my grandparents were so dear to me and I love talking to them about their childhood. The old I loved, I loved when they spoke in different languages. I loved my grandfather telling Bible stories. We would sleep over at their house on Friday when I was younger. Every Friday night we'd have Shabbat dinner with them and then I would sleep over and hearing the stories from their past was something I loved dearly. And so I wanted to go on the trip more to find those connections, then to connect with the scarier parts of their story, which were the yeah, the genocide part. And and I really even made a huge excuse not to go to Auschwitz, which was part of our trip, because I, I thought my daughter was too young and I didn't think she should go. But my daughter said, no, I can handle it. And so then I did have an excuse and I had to go. And I will say that walking through their camp and being with my family to do it was transformative. And I've come out of that feeling like, everybody should go to Auschwitz. Everyone in the whole world should walk through that camp, should through those gates, should should experience it and should should somehow internalize it in a way. And there was something about the reality of it that was more powerful than that, the imagination of it in a way that made me able to handle it. So I don't know if that makes any sense because it was horrible. But and, and I think it's really important. It was an important part of that trip that the end of the Auschwitz there's a room where there's a book that's six feet long. Maybe it takes up the whole room. I don't know if you've been there, but it's the names of everybody who was killed in the Holocaust. And so you can alphabetically go through it and you can. We found the page of the Berwalds. And seeing those names, I don't know why, but like it was something made me I was it made it real in a way that was really important. It's been important to me in my internalization of what happened to our family. I don't want to say it was healing, but there was something memorializing about it that made it powerful. That was one thing. Also, the going back to the Villages was amazing. I remember my grandma made all these pies all the time out of fruit and that village was literally in fruit. Fruit was falling off the trees. There were apples everywhere. Things. Yeah, peaches. I don't know. There was fruit all over that town. And I'm like, well, no wonder she baked with fruit all the time. And, and I and then we are seeing this the stones in the forest, the cemetery stones, and kind of noticing that the trees were 70 years old around the stones really felt like also an important thing to to witness. And then the dancing was I don't think any of us will ever forget that feeling of just holding hands with the people in this village and and dancing with them. And there was something someone said to me and one of the story and said, and my dad doesn't remember this, but a lot of historians said that it's possible that there were Berwalds in this village Raczki for 400 years. And to have. I. I, I can't because we are in this country for such a short time to think we were in somewhere else for such a long time made me feel connected to this planet. I guess in a longer, a more and an older way than I had felt before. I had gone to Poland. So it's those are sort of some of the top, top moments of that trip. Thank you. Thank you, Judy. Next Yeah, So I think my generation had a very different take on it, just because we don't have that connection to to to the to the great grandparents, to the people who actually lived there just because of our age. And I mean, I was 16 when we went. I didn't have that creative abyss of what actually happened. But the context about a lot of the things that I'm aware of now. But I really I think the biggest takeaway for me is what you call the third generation survivor, is that I was there with my family and my I was just looking through my roll and I have these videos of my of my grandfather, David, talking, giving me a tour of the village. And I think if if I lost like my entire camera roll, but that's it, I would be happy because it just shows how important it is that I have this connection between me, my parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents. And maybe 400 years before that's connected to this place that I don't even I didn't even know existed before we went there. And I just think being able to go there with my family was the most powerful part of this trip. I don't want to say that we were reclaiming the space because I don't think we were there to reclaim. We were there to memorialize. We were there to say, you know, look at what was lost, look at what has grown from that loss. And we were able to go back and really and really just cherish our lives as a whole. And I got a whole new appreciation for for just the the how our family works together and and how close we are. And I'm going back to Poland in May for part of this program I'm doing this semester, and I think it's going to be a very, very different experience in this one because not going with my family, I'm going with a more academic bend So it'll be interesting to go is I'm the only Jew in this program too. So that also gives me a different perspective. But I do think going as our family as to who we are today is that that was really powerful. It was definitely the most moving part of the trip. A general question. How do you feel about sharing this collection of letters that you have all compiled with a wider audience, potentially potentially impacting how others Holocaust history? I would love for that to happen, but I don't know how to make it happen. I, Juli and Lynn, Max's mother, essentially helped me to put this together. I will say that at the present time, still, I can't. The Holocaust Museum in Washington wants this stuff that I have. I have their green cards. I have the my dad's student cards, ID cards from France, Switzerland and Italy. And and and the one from Vilna that I mentioned before. And I have all these pictures which I've shared with the Holocaust Museum and Saint Louis, but the one in Washington that wanted me to donate the whole thing. And I can't do that. Juli's friends and they're good friends of mine because I went to high school with the with the mother's husband. He and I went to high school together, but in any case, they donated their whole trove of letters. But this is all I have. I have more. We have no souvenirs. We have no nothing other than these papers. And maybe a few and little items, one of which I did donate. And it was a wicker basket that mother brought her Trousseau to the United States. And I donated that to the Saint Louis Holocaust Museum. And so that's where we're at on this. And but I would be more than happy to publish the book more formally. I say there's a few little things that we could, but we basically put it together with the letter on one page and the translation on the next. And it takes time. It takes a lot of time and effort, but I'm willing to do it. Thank you. Max. Do you have such, such a plan? Do you have a plan to do something with this collection? I mean, the question that we always ask is, is historians and people considering these primary documents just like what makes them stand out, what makes them special? And I mean, I think coupling these documents with our trip and the intergenerational impact of these documents and the subsequent trip is what makes this makes everything special, in my opinion. I mean, as a student, I would love to do something with these documents. I would love to sort of reconstruct it in a way that I could pull out a couple of themes, a couple takeaways. But I do think that looking at these documents, a correspondence between people who were in a ghetto and people who were living comfortably in America is is is powerful for people learning about the Holocaust because it shows a whole new dimension. You read a lot about people who are physically in the Holocaust, but I don't think there's a whole lot about people who have escaped but still have family that are in Europe. And they're also getting this second hand information, maybe even guilt from like a survivor's guilt of what's happening. And I think the survivor's guilt was a big thing in our family. My grandfather talks a lot about silence around these letters, not translating them. And I think that's a big psychological aspect. But I just think that these these documents to highlight this a whole a whole different side of the Holocaust that people don't really talk about, which is like the splitting of families. And it does it at least for for me, it makes me more appreciative of the reason that I'm here today and how lucky I am I think what is interesting is how, Max, you seem to be basically highlighting all the main points in this process of figuring out how to work, for instance, towards, as I said, memorializing this collection letters. And you are right to say that I was reading a paper by the what is it called? It's called the Montreal anything. It's called the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. MIGS. And they published a paper on unpublished Holocaust memoirs. And this book is about the fact that, you know, the analyzed in the a few of the Holocaust memoirs where it were analyzed, those that were unpublished, as I said, it range from like 10 to 15 pages to a whole book. And of course, we would be curious to know why they were not published. And of course, one of the reasons one of the reasons given was that, you know, these these memoirs were not publication worthy because they didn't conform to certain rules, which Juli you know very well. Every publishing industry has its own rules. In fact, we also knew that some of the canonical writers such as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, actually even their works were rejected when they were sent for publication, including Otto Frank, who's the father of and Frank. All the works were actually rejected by the publishers because they just didn't appeal to the to the demand to demand out there. And, you know that the publishing industry is very much fake to the demands of writers and the themes that they want to read at that particular time. So I think Max just listening to you. Sort of makes me realize how you're very aware of the demands of the industry and you're aware that you have to conform to some of their demands for your work to be there and for it to be published. And you're very right. I think you have been able to highlight even the the crucial, distinctive factor about this collection, which is it's an account telling the experience of those who've managed to escape. And you rightly pointed out that word, you know, which is luck, right? Lucky You know, you feel lucky because a lot of the survivors who write about their experiences, those who escaped that possibility, they speak about where they ask themselves this question, how did I get to where and not the person next to me? And sometimes that selection or that attraction based on just simple luck, someone had had the mind to walk away, to get up, to just do the right thing and get away from a tragic experience. So yes, it was a big word. I wanted to I wanted to add two things. One, just about what you were just talking about in this Survivor first generation survivor group that I've been going to. The meetings there was we were each telling our stories and we just a little blurbs from it. And this one guy got up and said that his family had survived because when his mother and father were in line for the train, some man walked up behind his father and said don't get on the train, get on the truck. That's all he said. And the man that took that got on the truck went to a slave labor camp, escape from there. And the family survived. And then I wanted to add one last thing. This is from my father to you and to. Our. Family, because I've that so many times is that I once was just chatting with him and he said, you know, I really don't regret any of the things I did in my life. I regret the things I didn't do. And that was the way I felt about this trip. Everybody said, Why are you taking everybody? I said, Because I want to. It's the right thing to do and I want to do it. And so that I'll leave that with you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Juli Berwald is an ocean scientist and science writer based in Austin, Texas. She is the author of the Science Memoir and ten science Textbooks. And her magazine length pieces have appeared in The New York Times and National Geographic, among other publications. The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone was published by Penguin Random House, and in 2022, her Life on the Rocks building a future for coral reefs was published by the same organization we are here today to speak with her, as well as a father David and mother Gail and her nephew Max on a very different subject, which we’ll begin with a reading of an excerpt from a diary. But before we do that, Juli would you like to tell us a little bit about this diary and about the genesis, about the reason why there was a compilation of this diary by your family? Yeah, I guess I would call it. It's more of a collection of letters than a diary. And my dad can talk about it in more detail. But basically my father's parents were the only ones of their family to survive the invasion of Poland and the subsequent Holocaust. And my dad grew up, he often says, without knowing much about his grandparents and but after his mother died, that's my grandmother in the bottom of the China cabinet. My dad discovered around 100 letters, and those letters had been written from my grandparents family to my grandparents. After my grandparents came here in 1938, the letters were written in multiple languages. they were in Russian. They were a lot were in Yiddish, a couple were in Italian. They were a lot of languages. And so it took a long time. And I think my dad can speak to this more to get them translated. But ultimately he did and compiled them into a book. And so the excerpt I want to read, which I haven't talked to my dad about yet, is from this from February 12th, 1941. It is the I think one of the big question marks my dad always had was whether or not his grandparents knew he had been born. And this letter was proof that they did know that my dad had arrived in the world. it goes Dear Israel. Israel was my grandfather's name, Dear Israel. Yesterday I got the happy news about your newborn son. I wish you a lot of happy moments and long years with your son. Finally, after such a long wait, I'm very happy. The only problem is I cannot see the child. It has been a long time since I got any information from you that can be explained by the fact that you forgot our address. But I hope this is not the case. How is Vanya doing? Vanya was my grandmother. Manya cannot write because her eyesight recently has been bad. Her eyes are watering all the time. Recently, Mamma is not feeling very well, but there is nothing we can do about it. Maybe it will get better in the future. Write to us more often. Margolis got some beautiful clothing. It was sent three months ago. I wish you a lot of help and health and happiness Minna and Minna was my grandfather's sister and my middle name is Minette. I was named after her, so she knew that my dad had been born. too. David. Would you like to tell us what you feel about this extract and what sort of emotions it stirred in you? Well, I yeah, I think that what I was looking for in the in the letters, which is sort of my mother was sort of a pack rat just like I was. I am. And we didn't know I knew that she had some letters because I had seen a scatter scattering of them over the years. But she had a drawer on that kind of cabinet that she threw birthday cards and stuff into. And so I'm going through birthday cards with every person they ever knew. And all of a sudden I start finding these letters. Some were folded up. Most of them were postcards. And as Juli said, we found those appreciable number. Plus I found a whole load of letters, about 40 that had been written by my mother to my father in 1938, the year that they came to the United States. And those were all in Polish. And the reason for those letters is that my father's uncle brought the two of them to the United States under his sponsorship in 1938. There was very few Jews that were allowed to come to the United States. I think the entire country had 20,000 immigrants, and that's it for the whole year of 38 and 39. But anyway, the dad's uncle had shipped my mother down to Houston with some other family. She had never experienced weather like they have in Houston with the humidity and the heat and so on. She came from a northern country and so most of these letters detailed things that she did with this Aunt Rachel, who lived in Houston and the rest of the Berwald. I never met them. They never took us down to Houston or Dallas. I've resurrected a lot of these friends since I started looking into his genealogy to sort of finish that little story. We had a pathologist at my hospital where I was a surgeon who was from Poland, and I brought the letters to him and we would come once a week and he would translate. And he I'll never forget he made a cute saying. He says, These are your parents, you know, personal thoughts. Are you sure you want me? I said, That's all I have. I have got to have it. So he and I would scribe and he would translate the letters for me. And there was one actually that Juli did was an Italian, because my father had some of his training in Italy, knew nine languages, and then the rest was a real problem because they were all written in script Yiddish. And it's not print Hebrew, it's looks like chicken scratch, But that's what they were written it and I couldn't find. Everybody would tell me, yes, I know Polish. I mean, I know Yiddish. But they didn't and they didn't know how to do a script. Yiddish did never translated any of these letters. So I ended up going through YIVO, which is the Yiddish preservation organization in New York, and they got me a translator and it was not cheap, but I really didn't care. And we got all the letters translated. So that's the genesis of the book. It's very interesting that you say that because in my study of memoir literature of the Holocaust, what I found out was that although many scholars see today that that period post-Holocaust was silent, there were no publications perceived from survivors. And there are other scholars who've come in to contradict that statement and say there were tons people wanted to write about the experiences, but unfortunately there was a problem of language. Basically, all of these memos were in Yiddish and therefore not accessible to the English speaking world. So it's interesting that Juli now David just mentioned that you translated that letters, that letter which was in Italian, the Italian parts of the book today. I'm curious. I mean, you're a writer. I'm a writer too. And I know that sometimes we do engage in some translation work, but if we are to translate a letter or something as precious as this letter that you were translating, I'm curious to know whether you experienced anything different. What were your thoughts during that translation process? Well, my grandma was pretty miserable, so like, I think my dad's like she didn't like the weather. And the the truth is the the family that wasn't her family. It was my grandfather's family. They were horrible. They were not nice to her. I mean, I think that can be an experience of immigrants. And so and she thought that they were kind of kooky, like their behaviors were. So they were. One there was one person in the family who was. I don't think he was really maybe a great person. And so she was stuck with these people who weren't treating her great. She was sort of not loving. And so it was I, I mean, my grandma, like my dad said, was a big personality, but it made me she was she was, you know, in her twenties, late twenties when that was happening to her. And it helped me kind of connect with her in a way. I mean, I could put myself in her position and sort of understand why she was writing. And it was very honest. She was very honest with my grandfather. I'll throw in here, yeah, that there's one letter in which she was she writes, We are always so friendly and good when we are apart like this. How come we argue when I come home? Well, that was that letter, Dad. That was the Italian, right? And it's funny because they did. They fought like they fought like crazy. And they they insulted each other in different languages because they spoke so many because they'd had to move all over Europe for my grandfather to come get his education because of the anti-Semitism. But, you know, there was true there was love between them even though they they they fought it was kind of part of the relationship. And I think that's one thing like one thing that persecution can do is it can reduce the humanity of people to the numbers and and and to the the the idea of being persecuted. But like these letters reveal personality, which is humanity. And that's like what I find so important about them. Now obviously our audience doesn't know about the contents of this book, this collection of letters. I'm curious to hear what marked the three or four of you, rather, in, you know, when you perused the collection, what were the bits that you would like to discuss in terms of the persecution that we were experiencing and how was it approached? You know, in those times. I think that I'm going to change one word that she used and that is persecution. I think it was this is what happened and that was the way they viewed it. They I, I keep getting a feeling that there was a lot more going on in the day to day living like they were in a ghetto and in Belarus called Słonim and the Słonim ghetto had 25,000 people in it. And as far as we know, that's where they died. There was no trains, there was nothing taking them to Auschwitz or Birkenau or any of that. They did mention that it was hard to get things, you know, and they were very specific about saying, send us that. And they would they wanted to try and get better things. My mother's family, I think, was more well-to-do than my father was family, although that's maybe not quite true, I'm not sure. But I know, for example, this is there's one or two examples of it just blow me away is the ghetto was destroyed by the Einsatzgruppen, which was the murder squads from. And yet we got a postcard that is dated June 22nd or third, and the Einsatzgruppen came in and started liquidating the ghetto. On June 27. We still got a postcard from and that's the last postcard we got. But how did that happen? How did normal everyday things happen? And, they, the two families, would get together every week and they would have dinner together or Shabbos together. And Juli mentioned the the thing where they they killed a chicken and had a big meal celebrating my birth. So that and Dan's father would write these letters like we've had a difficult time but we've come out the other end and things will get better now and he also statements that after the invasion in 39 that they ran away to a town which I've been through and it's only ten miles away, but it was on the other side of the border. And so the Russians took it over and they he said the Russians were pretty nice to them And and his brother, my dad's brother had a job as a I don't know what a clerk or something like that. Those are things that they tried to make it sound as if they were doing all right. But there's an undercurrent in the letters that it wasn't. All right. You know, my dad tried to send them wool blankets and and some cloth, and I can't remember now whether they ever got it or not. But they and I, I did not find any evidence like the joint distribution committee would transfer money, but I don't know that they ever got any packages from Dad. They would beg for these things in the letters, but they didn't get very much. Thank you. Thanks for sharing this, Max. I have a question for you. How has your great grandmother's collection of letters shaped your understanding of the Holocaust compared to what you've learned at university? Yeah, I mean, I, I do have a particular interest in this area of history. It's something that I feel is very much in my blood. It's part of my heritage. And I think reading some of the letters about the the ghettos and how my family actually lived that experience compared with reading other people's diaries, reading other memoirs from people in other ghettos gives me this sense of connection and this deeper understanding of what happened. And so I think these letters have really have really sparked an interest, not just academically, but also emotionally. For me, just because I have I have, you know, all of these people that went through this experience, unlike some of my other classmates. And so I really do feel like I have a very different view of all of these events because I have these letters, because I have these personal primary documents, if that's what we can call them. And I think it's really interesting that I can draw upon the experiences of my own family rather than someone else who, you know, has been published and might seem very far off and academic. Where it's this source is something that's very close to me and it's very much a part of me as a person. I think David spoke about discovering how when he went to the museum, the Holocaust Museum that you are referred to as a first generation survivor. And what is interesting is in my exploration of memoir literature, I noticed a certain pattern in the way in the themes that are explored by, say, the survivors, the first generation survivors, the second generation survivors, the third generation, and so on and so forth. And what is interesting is that the themes that are discussed by all of these generations, of course, are different. So they are very relevant. Two to even Max. I mean, Max, you just spoke about, you know, how the Holocaust is very far away in the past, but you still feel a connect. And as we know, we speak very often about intergenerational trauma. We speak about half trauma passed down through generations. And, of course, you know, the memory of the Holocaust is also important. So even in the context of you being a third generation survivor, there is a whole drawer and there's a whole panoply of literature of books and memoirs out there on the stories or the accounts told by third generation survivors that the themes of course, change the change through time. You know, the interests are different. So I have a question to ask you. Do you see any lessons in your great grandmother's collection that feel relevant to today's world or your own life? I mean, I, I think the biggest takeaway is the amount of hope that my family had even when they were in the ghetto. When you read the letters, there's just this this sense of like we have people in America, we have people who are going to survive and get through this and carry on the family and I think that's really important. I've been reading a lot of of memoirs from this time, and I think there's I see a big difference between optimism and hope, where optimism you're looking at the what's going on around you and hope is looking towards the future. And I think my family in Poland had a whole lot of hope that my great grandparents were going to rebuild the family, and that's exactly what they did. And so me as a third generation survivor, and I'm a product of that hope and and of that rebuilding that happened, my great grandparents came to America and it was just them. And there's a great quote. It's it's from the two of us came to this big family and. I'm very much a part of that. And I think me and all of my cousins feel the same way. We have that same connection to the family, which is that hope of our of our relatives who were lost in the Holocaust. Thank you. Thank you, Max. Juli do have you come across other instances where you you where other families have engaged in the same act of compiling the letters or sort of like any memories. Yeah, it's very strange. I don't know if it's very strange, but my very my very best friend, who I grew up with in St Louis, when her grandmother died, her mother found a shoebox full of letters. Also, there were even more. There's probably 100 in our collection, and they probably have almost 250. And her family wasn't from Poland, they were from Germany. And they had them translated and it was this of a very strangely similar experience that we were learning about our great grandparents and their families, their stories of of World War Two at the same time, and trying to put together these people who we didn't know but whose stories were very emotional in these letters. But also, like my dad said, there's there seems to be some holding back like they were they were almost censoring themselves, I think, a little bit in the letters. Anyway, So my best friend also had this from growing up, had the same experience of finding out about her family and and the few survivors who who made it here had these letters from the people who didn't make it. I am just thinking about, you know, we all knew when we produce any tapes, we tend to censor ourselves. We get a lot of what we've written because we we feel that suddenly certain things should not be mentioned. And I'm just curious, because we've spoken a lot about what was going on in the background and how that was sort of like disguised. And there was a certain, you know, different there was a different image being portrayed, of course. I think one thing is that at least in our letters and I think I know who she's talking about. Yeah, they always, they say we are fine, everything is good. We have a place to live, we have enough food and I don't know that that's really true because, you know, they had no jobs. They had nothing to pay for anything with. And how could that be? There are some unexplained things that like there's some references in the letters in my mother's family where my grandfather, my mother's father went back and forth between Łomża and the ghetto and I don't know how he did that. There's one where the my grandmother, Rose, says, your grandma or your father will be back for Shabbos this weekend. How did he do that? Did he bribe people? They had a business that was a very good business and in the town of Łomża But I don't know. There's there's no way. Everything was always. Fine. So have you tried to has anyone even Max? I mean, that would be a very interesting area of research. You know, Have you tried to find out, for instance, the historical facts of those times about that particular area and any sort of accounts about what was really going on that you could then compliment with all the letters that you found? And of course, as I said, what was not been mentioned the unsaid in these letters. I think I can give you two stories. The first one is a thing called the ghetto bench, and it was the inciting cause of my father and mother to come to the United States. My father couldn't get his license to practice medicine because of being Jewish, and he decided to go to Vilna, to the university. There called Stefan Batory at the University of Vilna that still exists. And I have his student card. They saved everything, which is I have a little treasure trove of these things. And his reference to me was“I went to Vilna, to the university to get training and maybe become a teacher or professor. But when I got there, I saw Jews being beaten on the steps of the university” and I can date that there was a riot January 27th, I think over a thing called ghetto benches where they tried to make benches in the back or any Jew, any Gypsy, a Jehovah's Witness, anybody that they didn't like, they would make them sit on those benches and they weren't allowed to participate in class. They could listen, but they could not participate. And then they tried to expel all of the Jews. And the president of the university in Vilna refused to do it. And the students rioted and there was the Pogrom And that was sort of the inciting cause. My father never told me that story. He told me that when I saw Jews being beaten on the steps of the school where people should be educated, I decided that was it. I'm not going to stay. there's one question, of course. I mean, this is probably a what made Juli and I start like I think the time when I came to see you, Julie, at home last December. We spoke about that, I think, in detail. And that's very crucial to our program today, which is you all went on a trip to Poland please tell me your experience, because I I sensed very different emotions throughout in terms of what I watched of that trip on the view that you sent to me. And I also heard one or two of the audio recordings that you recorded when you were there. So, yes, I would like to know that one of the things I wanted to do as carrying forward the the memorial, or if you want to use that word of my parents and our family was that I wanted everybody in the family to know what they had gone through because I was the only one that was collecting it. this was sort of a knowledge trip that we wanted, our trip that I wanted our family and our children to have. And so I said, I don't care what it costs, I'm going to take everybody that wants to go. and I think it was very worthwhile because of the things that happened on the tour. there were a number of incidents on the trip and if anybody wants to add, please to Juli and Max is when we got to Poland, we met the young lady who was going to be our guide, and they had a van us. And I think it was one of the best trips I ever took in terms of accomplishing what you wanted to. And there were several things that just blew us away. And I think you've seen one of them as when we came Raczki and to show you how the interpretation of things is different. When we got Raczki, we got off the bus and there was a guide and another man who was a town historian, and they met us there and he said, and I brought some memorabilia and some pictures of the town and saw that my parents had brought. And the guy comes up to me and he says, Welcome to Raczki, and it's in the Suwałki District and so on and so forth. And have you seen, your father's factory. And I said, What are you talking about? They had a. farm. And the farm they lost the farm after, World War One, and moved into town. Well, I didn't know because my father never mentioned it, that his father, my grandfather, he and another family member and a friend and his best friend all had started a cloth factory and the building still existed in Raczki was the cultural center. They had a dance studio and they had computers. It's like, I guess it's it was like I was otherworldly and I never knew any of these things. My father told me we sold cloth. That was all he told then that the culmination of after we toured the town, we saw where the synagogue had been had been destroyed by the Nazis and where the cemetery had been. There was maybe one or two headstones left and the kids were very interested in that. And then we came back and we had this Silberstein installation. It's one of the few that are in Poland, and there's little brass plaques that are installed in front of the house where the person who was killed in the where they lived and the artist comes in and stalls and afterwards the entire town dances. Hora with us, I don't know if you know, it's Hebrew dance and so on and so forth. And it was just like, What is this going on? This is absolutely I could not understand it. It was like I did it. And to this day it's like, how did this happen? Well, the town was supportive of someone coming back. It's a little farm town. And they were there. There were 30 people dancing with. And so those are some of the things that we took. And then many other things like the visit to Auschwitz was really something my mother's home town was a larger town. So we her house was destroyed and her family business was destroyed. But they took us to the exact spot where the house was So we installed some stones there to and the town welcomed us. We went to the cemetery and so on. This was all way beyond what I thought we could accomplish. I think all the children, they remember this now. And, you know, you look through the book of our trip and all the pictures and it gives a little bit of depth to our family. And that's what I wanted to accomplish. I would love to hear from Juli from from Max, you know, about your experience as well, because I think you've all had different experiences of that trip. And that's a very big sort of like in terms of just Holocaust studies, genocide studies in general. I think we very often emphasize the importance of memorializing, right? So this was an act of memorializing Of what would ever happen in the family. And I think it's also, you know, the act of that act itself has very many benefits to the whole family. And I want you to speak about that In your experience, if it's possible. I'll say this I was nervous about going on the trip. I the Holocaust and. The stories have always been something that I have not embraced and I felt very nervous about. I did not want to go to Auschwitz either, like my Mom said, but my grandparents were so dear to me and I love talking to them about their childhood. The old I loved, I loved when they spoke in different languages. I loved my grandfather telling Bible stories. We would sleep over at their house on Friday when I was younger. Every Friday night we'd have Shabbat dinner with them and then I would sleep over and hearing the stories from their past was something I loved dearly. And so I wanted to go on the trip more to find those connections, then to connect with the scarier parts of their story, which were the yeah, the genocide part. And and I really even made a huge excuse not to go to Auschwitz, which was part of our trip, because I, I thought my daughter was too young and I didn't think she should go. But my daughter said, no, I can handle it. And so then I did have an excuse and I had to go. And I will say that walking through their camp and being with my family to do it was transformative. And I've come out of that feeling like, everybody should go to Auschwitz. Everyone in the whole world should walk through that camp, should through those gates, should should experience it and should should somehow internalize it in a way. And there was something about the reality of it that was more powerful than that, the imagination of it in a way that made me able to handle it. So I don't know if that makes any sense because it was horrible. But and, and I think it's really important. It was an important part of that trip that the end of the Auschwitz there's a room where there's a book that's six feet long. Maybe it takes up the whole room. I don't know if you've been there, but it's the names of everybody who was killed in the Holocaust. And so you can alphabetically go through it and you can. We found the page of the Berwalds. And seeing those names, I don't know why, but like it was something made me I was it made it real in a way that was really important. It's been important to me in my internalization of what happened to our family. I don't want to say it was healing, but there was something memorializing about it that made it powerful. That was one thing. Also, the going back to the Villages was amazing. I remember my grandma made all these pies all the time out of fruit and that village was literally in fruit. Fruit was falling off the trees. There were apples everywhere. Things. Yeah, peaches. I don't know. There was fruit all over that town. And I'm like, well, no wonder she baked with fruit all the time. And, and I and then we are seeing this the stones in the forest, the cemetery stones, and kind of noticing that the trees were 70 years old around the stones really felt like also an important thing to to witness. And then the dancing was I don't think any of us will ever forget that feeling of just holding hands with the people in this village and and dancing with them. And there was something someone said to me and one of the story and said, and my dad doesn't remember this, but a lot of historians said that it's possible that there were Berwalds in this village Raczki for 400 years. And to have. I. I, I can't because we are in this country for such a short time to think we were in somewhere else for such a long time made me feel connected to this planet. I guess in a longer, a more and an older way than I had felt before. I had gone to Poland. So it's those are sort of some of the top, top moments of that trip. Thank you. Thank you, Judy. Next Yeah, So I think my generation had a very different take on it, just because we don't have that connection to to to the to the great grandparents, to the people who actually lived there just because of our age. And I mean, I was 16 when we went. I didn't have that creative abyss of what actually happened. But the context about a lot of the things that I'm aware of now. But I really I think the biggest takeaway for me is what you call the third generation survivor, is that I was there with my family and my I was just looking through my roll and I have these videos of my of my grandfather, David, talking, giving me a tour of the village. And I think if if I lost like my entire camera roll, but that's it, I would be happy because it just shows how important it is that I have this connection between me, my parents, my grandparents, my great grandparents. And maybe 400 years before that's connected to this place that I don't even I didn't even know existed before we went there. And I just think being able to go there with my family was the most powerful part of this trip. I don't want to say that we were reclaiming the space because I don't think we were there to reclaim. We were there to memorialize. We were there to say, you know, look at what was lost, look at what has grown from that loss. And we were able to go back and really and really just cherish our lives as a whole. And I got a whole new appreciation for for just the the how our family works together and and how close we are. And I'm going back to Poland in May for part of this program I'm doing this semester, and I think it's going to be a very, very different experience in this one because not going with my family, I'm going with a more academic bend So it'll be interesting to go is I'm the only Jew in this program too. So that also gives me a different perspective. But I do think going as our family as to who we are today is that that was really powerful. It was definitely the most moving part of the trip. A general question. How do you feel about sharing this collection of letters that you have all compiled with a wider audience, potentially potentially impacting how others Holocaust history? I would love for that to happen, but I don't know how to make it happen. I, Juli and Lynn, Max's mother, essentially helped me to put this together. I will say that at the present time, still, I can't. The Holocaust Museum in Washington wants this stuff that I have. I have their green cards. I have the my dad's student cards, ID cards from France, Switzerland and Italy. And and and the one from Vilna that I mentioned before. And I have all these pictures which I've shared with the Holocaust Museum and Saint Louis, but the one in Washington that wanted me to donate the whole thing. And I can't do that. Juli's friends and they're good friends of mine because I went to high school with the with the mother's husband. He and I went to high school together, but in any case, they donated their whole trove of letters. But this is all I have. I have more. We have no souvenirs. We have no nothing other than these papers. And maybe a few and little items, one of which I did donate. And it was a wicker basket that mother brought her Trousseau to the United States. And I donated that to the Saint Louis Holocaust Museum. And so that's where we're at on this. And but I would be more than happy to publish the book more formally. I say there's a few little things that we could, but we basically put it together with the letter on one page and the translation on the next. And it takes time. It takes a lot of time and effort, but I'm willing to do it. Thank you. Max. Do you have such, such a plan? Do you have a plan to do something with this collection? I mean, the question that we always ask is, is historians and people considering these primary documents just like what makes them stand out, what makes them special? And I mean, I think coupling these documents with our trip and the intergenerational impact of these documents and the subsequent trip is what makes this makes everything special, in my opinion. I mean, as a student, I would love to do something with these documents. I would love to sort of reconstruct it in a way that I could pull out a couple of themes, a couple takeaways. But I do think that looking at these documents, a correspondence between people who were in a ghetto and people who were living comfortably in America is is is powerful for people learning about the Holocaust because it shows a whole new dimension. You read a lot about people who are physically in the Holocaust, but I don't think there's a whole lot about people who have escaped but still have family that are in Europe. And they're also getting this second hand information, maybe even guilt from like a survivor's guilt of what's happening. And I think the survivor's guilt was a big thing in our family. My grandfather talks a lot about silence around these letters, not translating them. And I think that's a big psychological aspect. But I just think that these these documents to highlight this a whole a whole different side of the Holocaust that people don't really talk about, which is like the splitting of families. And it does it at least for for me, it makes me more appreciative of the reason that I'm here today and how lucky I am I think what is interesting is how, Max, you seem to be basically highlighting all the main points in this process of figuring out how to work, for instance, towards, as I said, memorializing this collection letters. And you are right to say that I was reading a paper by the what is it called? It's called the Montreal anything. It's called the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies. MIGS. And they published a paper on unpublished Holocaust memoirs. And this book is about the fact that, you know, the analyzed in the a few of the Holocaust memoirs where it were analyzed, those that were unpublished, as I said, it range from like 10 to 15 pages to a whole book. And of course, we would be curious to know why they were not published. And of course, one of the reasons one of the reasons given was that, you know, these these memoirs were not publication worthy because they didn't conform to certain rules, which Juli you know very well. Every publishing industry has its own rules. In fact, we also knew that some of the canonical writers such as Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, actually even their works were rejected when they were sent for publication, including Otto Frank, who's the father of and Frank. All the works were actually rejected by the publishers because they just didn't appeal to the to the demand to demand out there. And, you know that the publishing industry is very much fake to the demands of writers and the themes that they want to read at that particular time. So I think Max just listening to you. Sort of makes me realize how you're very aware of the demands of the industry and you're aware that you have to conform to some of their demands for your work to be there and for it to be published. And you're very right. I think you have been able to highlight even the the crucial, distinctive factor about this collection, which is it's an account telling the experience of those who've managed to escape. And you rightly pointed out that word, you know, which is luck, right? Lucky You know, you feel lucky because a lot of the survivors who write about their experiences, those who escaped that possibility, they speak about where they ask themselves this question, how did I get to where and not the person next to me? And sometimes that selection or that attraction based on just simple luck, someone had had the mind to walk away, to get up, to just do the right thing and get away from a tragic experience. So yes, it was a big word. I wanted to I wanted to add two things. One, just about what you were just talking about in this Survivor first generation survivor group that I've been going to. The meetings there was we were each telling our stories and we just a little blurbs from it. And this one guy got up and said that his family had survived because when his mother and father were in line for the train, some man walked up behind his father and said don't get on the train, get on the truck. That's all he said. And the man that took that got on the truck went to a slave labor camp, escape from there. And the family survived. And then I wanted to add one last thing. This is from my father to you and to. Our. Family, because I've that so many times is that I once was just chatting with him and he said, you know, I really don't regret any of the things I did in my life. I regret the things I didn't do. And that was the way I felt about this trip. Everybody said, Why are you taking everybody? I said, Because I want to. It's the right thing to do and I want to do it. And so that I'll leave that with you. Thank you. Thank you so much. This was not to forgive, but to understand with our guests, Julie Berwald and family to our listeners. Don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. walking through their camp and being with my family to do it was transformative. And I've come out of that feeling like, everybody should go to Auschwitz. Everyone in the whole world should walk through that camp, should through those gates, should should experience it and should should somehow internalize it in a way.