What I’ve Learned Researching My Mother’s Holocaust Journey

I wrote Taken. Numbered. Survived. because I needed to understand what had happened to my mother and her family during the Holocaust.

My mother, Maria Katz Claman, rarely spoke about Auschwitz when I was growing up. I knew she had survived. I knew she had been deported, tattooed, forced into labour, marched near the end of the war, and displaced before coming to Canada. But I did not really know the story.

I wanted to know what had happened to her. I wanted to know what had happened to her parents, her sister, and the world they had known before everything was taken from them.

I thought I understood the Holocaust. Like many people, I knew the broad history. I knew about ghettos, deportations, Auschwitz, antisemitism, and mass murder. Only when I began researching my mother’s journey did I realize how much I did not know.

Even more painfully, I realized how little I knew about my own mother’s life before, during, and after the Holocaust.

What began as a personal effort to preserve her story became something much deeper. It changed the way I understood not only my mother’s life, but history itself.

A Story That Began With Silence

My mother rarely spoke in detail about Auschwitz when I was growing up.

Like many Holocaust survivors, she rebuilt her life instead of revisiting the past. She immigrated to Canada, raised a family, and carried memories that were always present, but seldom fully explained. The Holocaust existed in our home through silence, fragments, emotion, and the knowledge that something terrible had happened before I was born.

Years later, after her recorded testimony for the USC Shoah Foundation and after beginning archival research into her wartime experience, I started to understand something important.

The Holocaust was not only a story of death. It was also a story about ordinary life collapsing faster than people believed possible.

My research into my mother’s journey became the foundation for Taken. Numbered. Survived. But the deeper I researched, the more I understood that the lessons extended beyond my own........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)