During the pandemic lockdown, I had lots of time on my hands. I realized I didn’t know that much about my family’s past. I started out searching to see for what information was available. That search quickly became an obsession which turned into a memoir.

When I sat down to write the memoir, I approached it like every other book I had written. But it didn’t work out that way. It took me on a journey that I’m still on. It was transformational. It forced me to re-examine how I felt about my parents. I also reconsidered my relationships, my life priorities, and how I would use my remaining time here. It was not an easy journey, but I had a lot of help along the way.

It started as an 1800-word blog post four years ago. That’s all I knew about my parents’ experience at the time. I searched everywhere for information – in archives, databases, books, essays, and oral testimony from survivors. Mary Anne and I travelled to Poland in 2022 to see where my father came from. Places he never told me about.

As an adult, I learned to bury the negative memories and my own trauma. I built a wall around myself and kept people from getting too close. It worked for me until I wrote this memoir. Then all those things I had buried came flooding back, sending me to seek therapy.

As I began to recover, I became curious about what were other descendants of survivors experiencing. This curiosity led me to my next writing project. For much of 2024 and into 2025, I interviewed children and grandchildren of survivors. I conducted 106 interviews to study the impact of intergenerational trauma.