So Did My Mom — As Did Countless People After the Holocaust.

My mom was a survivor of Dachau. Twenty years after she passed, I discovered a journal she had kept — written, I imagine, in the hope that one day it would be published exactly as she wrote it—in the third person. Awww. She was the best.

It’s an unbelievable story of strength, detailing how she survived countless horrific situations and horrific people in a world that had become unrecognizably horrific.

My recollections of growing up weren’t of my mother speaking much about being a Zionist. My dad surely was. But in her writings, she talks about her commitment to Israel, which was not born out of the ashes of the concentration camps. It was woven into the very fabric of her childhood through her family’s connection to the arts and music.

In her journal, she wrote about her Uncle Leo:

Uncle Leo was an artist. He wore his hair shoulder-length, a style no one in Vilna—or anywhere in Europe—wore at that time. When Hennie was just eight, Uncle Leo had taken her to Warsaw and to buy very special oil paints. She often went to his studio, where he worked on a tremendous painting called “The Return to Zion”—a canvas so large he had to stand on a ladder to paint the fluffy clouds at the top.

A reproduction hung in their dining room, and Hennie often found herself gazing at it for hours, remembering the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)