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When I was 13, I watched my father lose his two-year battle with pancreatic cancer. Despite the years of suffering, his death still felt sudden, and without his joy, love, and knowledge, the world felt empty and strange.
As time passed and remembering him became less painful, I tried to think back on the stories he told me every night at bedtime about his childhood. I realized they were fading—if only I had taken the time to write them down. Instinctively, I turned to my father's mother's story, my grandmother Monique Eisenger, who survived the Holocaust. I felt an urgency to commit her experiences to paper while she is still here with me.
My determination to share her story only grew in response to the increasing antisemitism in the U.S. and around the world. The recent comments by Kanye West are just one chilling example. There were over 2,700 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Sadly, my generation, Generation Z, doesn't know as much about the Holocaust as previous generations who are more likely to have had relatives who lived through or fought in WWII.
People carry on the stories of family members that precede them, but in the Holocaust, whole families and towns were murdered, leaving no one to carry on their memory. Those who did survive often suffered from survivor's guilt and preferred to keep their traumas within. My grandmother did not tell anyone about that harrowing period of her childhood until my father began asking her questions in his twenties to better understand his family history.
Learning my grandmother's story
Three years ago, when I was 13, I went to visit my grandmother in Florida and asked her if I could record her story to preserve it for history and share it with young people—my peers. Fortunately, she indulged me. She had previously recorded a testimony for the Shoah Foundation, but I wanted to know every detail of her story.
I learned that, at the age of nine, my grandmother and her mother fled Vienna and went to Switzerland. My great-grandmother then went to Paris and smuggled my grandmother over the border a week later. My great-grandmother then told my grandmother that she was going to America on a work visa—without her. So my grandmother went to live with a host family, before living with her own grandmother in Buxières-Les-Mines, where they lived for the remainder of the war.
I interviewed my grandmother for many hours over many weeks, learning about her family's harrowing escape from the Nazis and how they found strength in each other's courage. I got to know her as a child, a teen, and a hero for her own grandmother.
I felt very proud of my grandmother when she shared her story with me. She was a survivor on so many levels.
As I traveled back home to New York, I envisioned sharing her story with other teens in the form of a Young Adult novel. YA speaks to kids my age, with its universal themes of love and friendship that may be set in foreign places yet seem familiar. I believe a novel can touch people more effectively than a statistic or a textbook because it humanizes the past, its vivid description making it real for readers.
Sharing my family's history with my peers
I started writing the novel shortly after I turned 13, over the summer before 8th grade. I continued writing it during holiday breaks, and finished the manuscript last June at the age of 15. Looking back, it was such a challenge—but an important and worthy one.
The events of the book are based on my grandmother's true story. None of the major characters, plot points, or twists are fictionalized. However, my grandmother's memory of many of the details of the environment and settings at the time proved difficulty for her to remember. In these cases, to help support the narrative experience for the reader, I researched the period details, doing my best to match my grandmother's recollections of, for example, how a room may have been decorated with my research into furniture, style, and conventions of the day.
I am proud to bring my grandmother's Holocaust story to life for my generation. My novel joins other work from young writers trying to educate my generation about the Holocaust. Dov Forman, the best-selling author of Lily's Promise, a memoir that documents his great-grandmother's life during the Holocaust, makes TikTok videos of his great-grandmother answering questions about her life. He has 1.9 millions followers, which reveals the power of the medium to share the past.
Similarly, Instagram star Montana Tucker is taking a break from her dance videos and instead documenting her visit to Auschwitz for her 8 million followers to learn about her great-grandmother's death.
Given the worrying rise of antisemitism in the past few years, I believe we must continue to find ways to share these true stories of the Holocaust, so my generation never forgets them.
Suzette Sheft, 16, is a high school student and the author of Running for Shelter, which is out now.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
