There is a photograph sitting on my desk as I write this. It is from 1948, the year Israel declared itself into existence and was immediately fighting five armies for the right to keep existing.
In Episode 487 of Education in Motion on hmTv, host Zachary Graulich, Assistant Director of Education at the @hmTv-hmtc Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County, sits down with Dr. Janet Brill, bestselling author and researcher, for a powerful conversation about memory, resilience, and the responsibility to bear witness.
The…
The Arithmetic of Survival
Ten Szureks entered the war. Four survived. The math did not end there.
Miriam, Edna, and Yakov Szurek, postwar. Three siblings who survived the Holocaust on the Aryan side of Warsaw. Out of ten immediate family members, four survived.
Look at this photograph.
Three faces.
A young woman.…
A Beach in Nantucket. A Gas Chamber in Treblinka.
Summer of '42
Two meanings of “Summer of ’42.”
A coming-of-age romance for Americans. A season of mass murder for Europe’s Jews.
In 1971, I was fourteen, sitting in a darkened movie theater, watching Jennifer O’Neill break my heart.
Summer of ’42 was the film everyone was talking…
How Hitler’s rage after Operation Valkyrie shaped a nine-year-old’s war Janet Bond Brill, PhD
SS forces in Wola, Warsaw Uprising, August 1944. Photo credit: Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-696-0426-22 / Leher / CC-BY-SA 3.0
August 5, 1944. Wola District, Warsaw.
Amid smoke, rubble, and gunfire, a nine-year-old girl ran for her life.
Her code name was KAJTEK.…
The Lost Grandfather
What a Nazi intake form cannot record—and what memory must carry
My husband Sam never knew his grandfather.
There are no stories of being bounced on Avraham’s knee.
No memories of his voice, his laugh, the way he smelled of tobacco or sawdust or whatever fathers smelled of in 1930s…
Edna Stefania Brill – Warsaw, 1989 Standing at the Mila 18 memorial, site of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising command bunker. The mound was built from the stones of her childhood home. It was here, in this building, that would one day house the command bunker of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, that she came into the…
She was nine years old when she joined the Polish Home Army, the youngest soldier in the entire resistance force. A Jewish child hiding under a false Polish Catholic identity, she chose to fight back against the Nazis who were murdering her people. Nine when she ran messages through sniper-infested streets during the Warsaw Uprising.…