Finding Kalman: A Boy in Six Million

I felt like my feet were burning, Anna Huberman Jacobs says, describing the day in 1945 that she went back to her home in Wloclawek, Poland. Anna had survived life in the Warsaw ghetto, escape, imprisonment at a Nazi labor camp, and near starvation in post-Liberation Poland. On returning home, Anna learned that she was the sole survivor of her family. It was the worst day of her life. For Anna, finding Kalman that day meant leaving Wloclawek with a photograph of her brother that a neighbor’s child had pulled from the garbage. It was the only remainder of her family’s personal belongings. Left with just memories and the single photo, Anna began her new life. Years later, the image of Kalman, forever a child in the photograph, captured the imagination of Anna’s daughter Roz, a curious, artistic child who wanted to know every detail of the story that her mother was clearly not completely sharing with her. For Roz as a child, finding Kalman meant gazing at his image, fantasizing that she would bring this lost brother back to her mother. As an adult, finding Kalman was discovering his identity in every brushstroke as Roz worked to recapture his essence over and over again on her canvas and in the creation of a multimedia artwork: The Memory Project. Finding Kalman: A Boy In Six Million weaves Anna’s story of escape and survival with Roz’s desire to have a purposeful life, to answer destruction through the act of creating. Kalman’s voice, though silenced, remains loud in the lives of both mother and daughter in this story of memory, self-discovery and creation.