January 13, 2025

Join author Bob Don on Monday January 13, 2025 from 7:00 – 8:30 pm (Central) for a presentation and discussion about his memoir, The Difference, which details his mother’s life as a Schindler survivor.

Registration is required for this event. Please register on the Beth Emet website HERE.

 

Event Description:

On Yom Kippur Day, October 1993, the rabbi’s sermon in our synagogue was the story of the upcoming release next month of the movie “Schindler’s List.”  It had been five years since my mother had passed away.  At the end of the Rabbi’s sermon, my father leaned over to me and told me something she never did.  It was six words I would never forget – “Your mother was on that list.”

The Difference: The memoir explores what I know of my mother’s teenage life as a Schindler’s List survivor, which confronts Intergenerational Trauma (“Second Generation” holocaust survivor trauma) manifested in racism – how it can begin, what it can do to us –deeply penetrating its familial and social ramifications and how we can reconcile even amidst the reach of darkness. The underlying theme draws upon my mother’s life being saved by Oskar Schindler – a Nazi German, and the irony of how her children grew up.

The story explores my mother’s trauma, primarily resulting from the atrocities she endured during the Holocaust, with her parents and six of seven brothers and sisters who were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.  She deeply inflicted her trauma upon her sons as children but far more critically on my brother through bitter hatred for my German stepmother and all Germans.

Jesse Eisenberg’s new movie that was recently released, “A Real Pain,” which he directed, is a story of Intergenerational Trauma due to the Holocaust.  The film hopefully begins to change that there has always been so much shared of survivors’ accounts of the atrocities they lived through in the Holocaust, but not nearly enough of the impact of their trauma upon their children. This is what my brother and I grew up with as children – our mother’s trauma being our trauma.

About the Author: Robert Don has been changing careers from his professional background in senior risk management in corporate banking to becoming a writer. He recently conducted research in both the Auschwitz and Plaszow concentration camps, where his mother was deported, and is deeply familiar with the Holocaust stories being told. Having lived through this story, he finally wanted to tell the story and is well versed in the details of this time period of the Holocaust.  The Difference would be his debut book.

(Source: A Schindler’s List Survivor’s Story Never Told – Beth Emet)