Family History

My mother and father married in this historic synagogue in Prague in 1945. Nine months later I was born in the United States. Both of my parents were born in a small town in Czechoslovakia, though my father was born 17 years before my mother. He knew my mother as a child before emigrating to the U.S. in 1938. Sadly, he returned to Europe as an American soldier during the war.

My mother was a prisoner in Auschwitz for 18 months. After the liberation, she and her sister returned to their hometown; the only Jews to return. My father also returned looking for his family, finding none. A whole generation erased without a trace.

I visited the cemetery with my German husband in 1976. We'd been living in Germany since 1972. During my entire stay in Germany I never once desired to visit an old concentration camp. My mother never told me any details of her past. I never knew she had married in this historic synagogue until I told her about my visit there. Our family's roots were wiped out not only by the reality of mass genocide, but by growing up in an atmosphere where bringing up the past only made the present unbearable.

"The Old Jewish Cemetery" marked a meeting with my inherited history. The images haunt the deepest part of my psyche and thereby my art making. The stories of the past are gently emerging.