Finding Home

My family's story begins in Vilna, the "Jerusalem of the North." Antisemitism drives Papa to France, where he attends college, finds good employment, and persuades Mommie to join him. Eddy is born one month before the outbreak of World War II. Their life becomes a thrilling and scary adventure story, involving biking all over the free zone, forging exit documents, securing entry visas to the United States, fleeing to Casablanca, and sailing on a ship full of Jewish refugees into New York Harbor in June 1942. Three years later, I am born in Manhattan. We feel we have made it in America when Eddy gets into Harvard and we get our first car. And I finally will go to France - where I feel I should have been born - for my junior year at Bryn Mawr College. Two transatlantic crossings a generation apart; two transformative journeys. And 40 years later, a third journey - to the city of Vilnius and nearby oil pits at Ponary, the spot where the Nazis murdered Mommie's family.

Finding Home is the story of how, over decades, antisemitism and then the Holocaust shaped my family. There were triumphs and there were victims: Mommie and Eddy, who bore war wounds that could not be seen.