I wanted to preserve my mother’s story to give my children roots
Growing up in Sydney, Australia, in a family of proudly traditional Jews, I was acutely aware that my parents were Holocaust survivors. But I didn’t know many details of their war experiences.
I was a typical self-absorbed adolescent, so even when I had a school assignment about my parents’ youth, I kept it short and sweet, not absorbing much; on the one occasion that my father really shared his past, it went in one ear and out the other.
With age and maturity, though, came the dawning realization that my parents’ story needed to be recorded. If I didn’t want my children to grow up rootless and oblivious of their past, my parents’ testimony needed to be preserved for future generations.
When I began thinking along those lines, though, I was a busy mom of seven little Benporaths, who were joined by twins just a couple of years later, so I didn’t act on that idea for some years. There simply wasn’t time.
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