2023-07-07
A Holocaust survivor memoir combined with a daughter’s intimate account of generational trauma.
Leibovits (b. 1928) survived Auschwitz in the final year of the war. In this chilling tale, her daughter, Elboim, narrates her mother’s story and relates how she grew up in Israel under the shadow of a destroyed family. From a tiny community in Czechoslovakia that was annexed by Hungary just before World War II, Leibovits, nee Suri Hershkovits, was 15 when she and her family were rounded up and taken by cattle car to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. Because it was late in the war, the gruesome gears of extermination were churning, and her mother and brothers were immediately sent to the gas chambers, while her father became a Sonderkommando, chosen to dispose of bodies from the crematorium (he was executed a few months later). Along with several of her compatriots, Leibovits endured unimaginable conditions of grueling labor, “unbearable hunger,” horrendous hygiene, and subsequent ill health. She was able to see her father several times through barbed-wire fences, and he told her to eat everything (kosher or not) to survive. He also sent her notes and small things like makeup, which confounded the girls at first until they realized it helped them look healthier, possibly saving them from being selected for death. Leibovits and Elboim describe these details with intentional specificity as a testament and record for future generations. Interspersed throughout are the poignant, often heartbreaking reflections of Elboim, who expresses the deep sorrow she had to embrace as a child of her haunted mother. “I suppose that every Holocaust survivor is like a charred log that will never really stop burning,” she writes. “But every survivor had his or her own fate, during the Holocaust and afterwards, and no survivor is like any other.”
A moving account that concludes with a sense of triumph over evil and darkness.
