When Sara Ullman, JFS' Kosher Meals on Wheels Coordinator, challenged herself to write a short story for this year's "73 Words in the 732," a contest organized by the East Brunswick Public Library, she knew immediately what she wanted to write about: Erika Ettner, her mother and Holocaust survivor, one of 10,000 orphaned Jewish children who escaped Nazi persecution. The hardest part was selecting the right words to express and honor her mother's life while acknowledging her own experience as a child of a Holocaust Survivor. Sara notes, "for my mother, she was orphaned at age 8 and escaped Vienna on the Kindertransport [...] when she came to the U.S. she stayed with family but then was taken in by a foster family--her experience impacted her emotionally."
While Sara's 73-word story is a moment of remembrance, it reminds us that no two Holocaust Survivors' stories are the same, and neither are the experiences of survival and resilience that persist through the children of survivors. She learned the impact the Holocaust had on her mother and her family at a young age--this exposure inspired Sara in adulthood to support remembrance projects, focus on connecting with educational initiatives, and honor her mother's story as part of her own story of how we can find our way out and through tragedy.
Read Sara's 73-word short story, Second Generation, or listen to her 2-minute interview and reading on the East Brunswick Public Library's podcast:
