When I was an MA student, one of my professors tried to convince me to do research on my Jewish-Slovak roots, the history, culture and of course the music. My respond was one: "NO." I was in total resentment toward the subject. I had escaped It for years and wished to be what I considered a "normal" scholar, doing research on music and the arts. Little did I know that my own history as second generation of holocaust survivors will bring me back, once, and again, to the topic I tried so hard to avoid.

 

After obtaining my PhD degree I found myself looking for every piece of information about my family's life in pre holocaust Slovakia, during the holocaust and after it. I have been centring on two Jewish communities in the towns my parents came from, Michalovce and Prešov.  Two magnificent communities that after the holocaust were no longer part of the living, breathing body of these towns: forgotten and almost erased. On top of it all, and after many years of silence, we, my daughter Sivanit and I, managed to convince my sister Helen to tell us the story of her life. The life of my mother's first family in Slovakia, a life of a family in the Jewish community of Michalovce, before and after the holocaust. Both, "life before it all began" and "life after it all" presented in my novel.

 

We listened to Helen every Tuesday for several weeks and documented every word of hers. Alas, she did not agree to be photographed or recorded.

 

Two years after finishing this project my sister fell ill. On her death bed she asked me to fulfil the oral testament of her sister (my half-sister) Lili given to her in Birkenau: "I will not survive, but you must go on and let the world know what has happened to us here." Lily was sent to the gas chamber on that evening, the 24th of December 1942. "I have not kept my promise," said Helen, "I just didn't have the strength…… I am passing the torch on to you Edith. You will do it."

 

Helen died in Israel in September 2005, at the age of eighty.

 

In 2011 my autobiographical novel 'Travels with Vera' was published in Hebrew. It sums up an important part of the information that I have been collecting, including parts of Helen's testimony, my mother Shari's testimony, and other testimonies of members of the extended family. But... there is a lot more to be done, and I still have a long way to go with this research.