Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27, 1945. An estimated 400,000 Holocaust survivors are alive today. Most were children during the Nazi reign of death. Childhood trauma of such magnitude carves deep scars in one’s mind and body, but can also build skills of resilience. As Holocaust survivors age, we hurry to capture their true stories while they are still with us. The horrors they endured are almost beyond human imagination. However, as a fiction writer, I’m called upon to use my imagination to conjure those experiences and make them real for readers. See my stories “Golo’s Transport,” in which an angry old man confronts the trauma of his parents sending him away on the Kindertransport from Germany to England on the eve of WW II (The Madison Review, Fall 2017) and “Orphan Camp,” which examines how the resilience that allowed Jewish children to survive during WWII made them resistant to adoption afterwards (Summerset Review, Winter 2019). Read more about these and my other stories in SHORT STORIES.
