Family Focus
Holocaust Legacy
"My mother's story lived inside me like an organ."
Judith Doner Berne
Special to the Jewish News
A
s a high school senior, Erin
Einhorn wrote a prize-winning
story about her mother, who was
hidden as a baby during the Holocaust and
eventually brought to the United States by a
father she barely knew.
"The day that article
ran in my 400-circulation
high school monthly [the
West Bloomfield High
School Spectrum] was the
day I decided to go into
journalism:' said Einhorn,
35, who grew up in West
Erin Einhorn
Bloomfield and now lives
in Brooklyn.
Since graduating from the University of
Michigan, she has reported for the Detroit
Free Press, two Philadelphia dailies and now
covers city hall for the New York Daily News.
"But this story, my mother's story, lived
inside me like an organ',' Einhorn writes,
although her mother, Irene Einhorn, mostly
refused to discuss it.
"I relished its dramatic arc, its tale of
love in a time of desperation, of lives begun
with no hope of survival, of a father's daring
leap from a moving train and of a Polish
mother's courageous sacrifice!"
Book Signing
Erin will appear at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept.
16, at Borders Books in Novi to launch The
Pages in Between, A Holocaust Legacy of
Two Families, One Home, published a week
earlier by Touchstone Books, a division of
Simon &Schuster.
The memoir chronicles her nearly
year-long successful search, in Poland
and Sweden during 2001, to find the
families who helped her mother survive the
Holocaust and to track down documenta-
tion of her heritage. It also reveals a complex
relationship with her mother, combined
with sorrows and complications she hadn't
anticipated.
Although Erin's dream was to reunite her
mom with the two families, Irene died of
cancer at 59 before her daughter had made
much headway.
Although Erin tracked down both fami-
lies and a slew of family records, she found
that her mother's memories and family folk-
lore didn't mesh with the records, including
the way Irene's mother may have died.
And although Erin had an emotional
reunion with the Polish family who saved
C20
September 4 • 2008
jN
This photo of Irene Einhorn as a small child, flanked by the woman who hid her and her father who survived the Holocaust,
graces the cover of Erin Einhorn's new book, "The Pages In Between."
"Irena" and still lives on her family's prop-
erty in Bedzin, she discovered they had
an agenda. They want her to make good
on a promise made 60 years ago between
people who are now dead to turn over
property to them.
As she writes,"I'd come looking for their
story, maybe their friendship. A part of me
believed the past existed here like a book
on a shelf I could check out and take home,
show to my family. I hadn't considered that
the past may have lived on here, its charac-
ters still angry, its plots unresolved!'
Polish Influence
Erin's year in Poland, where she walked
a fine line between a Poland that now
dances to Jewish klezmer music and the
Poland where her family was persecuted,
was made even more challenging by her
mother's death.
On the streets of Bedzin, "I had the feel-
ing sometimes ... that my mom could see
through my eyes, that what I could see she
could, too; that if I walked slowly enough
and thought enough about her, she would
be with me, as she would have been if
things had turned out differently, if we'd
had a little more luck or she a little less
cancer," she writes.
"I was always loved," had been Irene's
mantra and the way she warded off Erin's
questions. But the facts sometimes showed
otherwise.
She found, for example, that Irene's
memory of her father, who survived the
Holocaust, picking her up at a Polish
orphanage where she was placed after the
war ended never happened.
In fact, the childcare division of Poland's
Central Jewish Committee in Warsaw had
detailed records showing that a mix of
people over a period of days took her to
him in Stockholm, Sweden. "My mother was
delivered from one place to the next as a
kind of package that needed, at every turn,
to be signed for:' she details in the book.
She encourages others to trace their
family's Holocaust history. "There's more out
there than you think there is',' she says of the
family records she was able to uncover. "I
was amazed at how much I found without
that much effort!'
If Erin's time in Poland was a journey, so
was the attempt to get her book published.
When no publisher bit at her proposal, she
went ahead, thinking: "If they all pass on
it, I'll write it anyway, even if just for my
friends and family"
Rise Of A Book
Aided by several leaves of absence from her
reporting job, she finished the first draft in
June 2003. Two more years of revisions and
she was ready to shop it again, but still no
takers.
In November 2005, National Public
Radio's "This American Life" aired a seg-
ment from the book, including a pitch that
she was looking for a publisher.
When the phone didn't ring, she gave it
all up. "I quit my job, took a buyout, broke
up with my boyfriend [to whom she is
now engaged], ran a marathon, rented out
my Philadelphia house and moved to New
York City.
"It was an attempt to put the failure of
this book behind me,' she says. After spend-
ing four to five years on it, "I grieved it like
a death:'
Fourteen months later, a publisher found
her. In January 2007,"This American Life"
aired a rerun of Einhorn's broadcast. A
Legacy on page B21