Why I Became a Writer – The Story I Need to Tell
I decided to change careers from my professional background in corporate banking, reaching senior roles, actually when I was laid off from my position with PNC Bank in late 2021. The voice inside me had grown too much and couldn’t be silent any longer. I had to write about the unconscionable injustices that I saw within racial bias in our own government and after the Hamas attack October 7th into Israel. Racial inequality that I saw in too many of our perceptions and antisemitism that had been polarizing the world more than I’ve ever remembered continues to be not more prevalent than since the Holocaust. I felt what better way to let people see how dangerous segregation is for our lives than being an underlying theme of a memoir for my mother’s life, who was a “Schindler’s List” survivor, which confronted intergenerational trauma manifested in racism – “In the Midst of Darkness.” My brother and I inherited my mother’s holocaust survivor trauma – the underserved lifetime of hatred for my German stepmother and every other German.
If I could tell a story of my mother’s being life saved by Oskar Schindler – a Nazi German and the irony of how her children grew up that might change how by how we look at people differently than ourselves, based on nothing more than our own bias. The research I conducted in both the Auschwitz and Plaszow concentration camps, where my mother was deported helped me reach the intellectual capacity, I needed to be well versed in the details of this time period. I was convinced that I had to write this story but I also want to continue writing. My voice needs to be heard, and no one could take that away from me. How could anyone not feel every bit of the unforgettable moment when someone tells you by what’ you’ve shared, they see the relevance of your experience for their own lives, especially if they feel a part of them living your story.
After what I saw that happened in the concentration camps in what my mother had to have lived through – feeling how unconscionable what another human can do to another while there alive and when there dead, there was an unrelenting conviction to articulate where racial bias can lead. The penetration of hatred for a religion and a culture throughout the world over the Holocaust based on nothing more than myth. While I would tell the story of Oskar Schindler, who was a member of the Nazi party being the movement for racist ideology that saw Jews only as parasitic vermin that must be exterminated on an unprecedented scale. The guilty who bared responsibility for the Holocaust. But after Schindler finally had seen the atrocities that were being inflicted to Jews in the ghettos and the camps, his conscious would no longer let him continue to be complicit in the midst of a genocide. He would save my mother and that many other innocent Jewish lives, who were not more certain of their inevitable fate only being death. If nothing else writing could let me tell everything I felt inside over the darkest time in the world’s history – how the road for inhumanity penetrated to a magnitude that has never left us. But that only led Schindler to find humanity when there were very few that did, amidst a world where many didn’t feel different.
The story I’ve told of what I felt has left me the right of passage for my voice. It’s the cathartic outlet that I never needed as much as I felt that did. That has let me find a release for the trauma my brother and I inherited, being the victims of everything my mother went through in the Holocaust and when my father left her pregnant with me. There was no way she could ever see what that had done to her and been inflicted in her children. The voice that I never was able to share before has let me legitimize the pain. But more than anything is my insatiable ambition for sharing the weight of the losses by what happened to our family. Hopefully it’s learning that will stay with others to not let what we couldn’t help happening to them.
Writing has not only been expression that lets your voice be heard, but can especially fill you with immeasurable hope, when no one else has listened. That’s why I’ve written the memoir of my mother’s life that confronts intergenerational trauma. But it’s been that hard to understand and honestly heartbreaking when that many synagogues and sanctuaries for Holocaust remembrance have not been responsive to a story of a Schindler Jew and the generational trauma both her sons inherited. While writing the story does let you feel you feel that you can reach everyone by what you to have to tell them. How much you remember the unforgettable feeling being never more certain that many others understand your story and everything it hopefully opens for them by what it can mean for their own lives.
