How do you remember someone who has left no trace?
Esther Safran Foer grew up in a family where the past was too terrible to speak of. Her parents, the only members of their families to survive the Holocaust, never shared the horrors they had suffered.
There was silence where the past should have been.
So when Esther’s mother makes an astonishing revelation about her father, Esther resolves to follow the trail, wherever it may lead.
This is a powerful memoir of one woman’s extraordinary journey to find answers to the burning question about her past, her ancestors, what they endured and how they survived – that could never be asked until now…
So, let me gather my thoughts, for this is Esther’s story that she has shared with us, revealing her determination to remember those she’s lost, and find kinship after tragedy. This is a memoir that draws a distinction between memory and history, and then attempts to make a cohesive whole of the two.
Like all of us, Esther’s mother remembers in fragments. As we revisit and revisit the fragments more details might emerge, are they imagined, or factual? Where does it leave the search for a personal history, perhaps though, more than personal, but the history of a region, a town, a tribe. It entails paperwork, travel, searching, always searching, matching memory to history.
And how well this is conveyed in this memoir. The search – was memory true, was it factual?
I have experienced this to some extent. My maternal grandma died when mum was two. There are no photos. Mum remembered her in fragments, but spoke of it only when asked, and that as we were adult. Was it because it hurt, made the loss, the aching vacuum, real? But those fragments she began reveal were the memories of others.. Were they accurately remembered by the teller? Had mum remembered accurately what she had been told? Who knows, after much investigation we were none the wiser. So we are left with fragments, and these have begun to fade.
In this zigzag of a book, with memories, and history intermingling, double backing, rushing forward, we learn about life in Kolki, Ukraine, home to Esther’s family, a shtetl, where so close are the kinship bonds that your best school friend, is likely to be the child of your second cousin, for this is where your tribe has lived for generation, after generation. It is more than a town, it is your world, your friends, your family.
You hear that the Nazis are coming. You believe the horror stories you have heard perhaps because you are a young adult. Others don’t leave. It’s nonsense, or, this will pass. You leave the safety of the shtetl , you leave your mother without saying a proper goodbye. Your sister gives you a spare pair of shoes. You drop one as you flee. These two incidents haunt on. You didn’t say goodbye, you dropped a shoe, a gift from a sister.
You are just in time, because soon armed Nazis anti-semites enter your shtetl, your world. Perhaps they pack up inhabitants take them to nearby fields, (march or lorry, babies being carried, children clutching skirts) where they must dig great ditches, into which they tumble when shot; men women children. All Jews. Or perhaps to a camp. Not just one shtetl, but all the shtelts.
There is no-one left to tell the history of your family’s shtetl, or the neighbouring shtetl’s history. Where is your mother who you did not bid farewell, the sister whose shoe you dropped?
What about other survivors. They can remember their own stories, in the turmoil, fear shock, perhaps,but can only surmise about the fate of families.
This book really, though about one family, is about all families.
I Want You To Know We’re Still Here is unique. It is a evocation of a lost world, of an unimaginable sin, of the annihilation of history from the perspective of the victims, so that it is the survivors who pursue the memory to reach the town, to locate the truth. to tell the truth, to show that ‘We’re Still Here.’
Esther Safran Foer goes on that journey.
Heartbreaking, perhaps best read in small doses,a journey into memory and the past in the search for truth.
I met a friend in London a very few years ago, who had returned to the UK from her ‘now’ home abroad. She wore a necklace, a Star of David. I could see it over her clothing as she walked up the platform towards me, a broad smile on her face. She reached out to me. ‘Wear it inside your clothes,’ I said. ‘Just to be safe.’
She said, sad despair in her voice, ‘You are the second who has warned me of this, a stranger on the train as we approached London, and you, my friend. My mother would have been packing our cases, leaving them in the hall, ready for flight, again.’
Read this, feel it, applaud the author. You will not forget it. Indeed it must be remembered.
Hardback and e-Book available now. Paperback 16th April. Pub HQ.
Annie Clarke is the author of the Home Front series.
