Saving the Tremors of Past Lives ― A Cross-generational Holocaust Memoir

The Jewish community of the Polish border town of Brzesc (Brisk in Yiddish), which had numbered almost 30,000 people, was wiped out during the Holocaust, with only about 10 of its members surviving. One of them was Masza Pinczuk, who escaped from the Brzesc ghetto on the eve of its liquidation on Oct.15, 1942. Her future husband succeeded in escaping from the Warsaw ghetto. They were the sole survivors of their respective families, and in this volume their daughter, Regina Grol, shares their story and meditates on the legacy of the Holocaust, exploring the lingering impact of the Holocaust on the following generations. Based on interviews and letters, and checked against historical facts, the book includes supporting documents and photographs. It also contains an account of the author’s “internal flanerie” (to use Walter Benjamin’s term), i.e., a retrospective and introspective look at her own life as a child of Holocaust survivors.

Regina Grol (PhD State University of New York-Binghamton) has taught Polish studies and is currently a fellow at the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies at the University of North Caroline-Chapel Hill. She has been a professor of comparative literature at Empire State College, State University of New York, and a visiting professor at Rutgers University and Hunter College of CUNY. In addition to numerous critical essays, her publications include several bilingual poetry volumes, including the anthology Ambers Aglow: Contemporary Polish Women’s Poetry 1981-1995 (1996) and her translation of And Yet I Still Have Dreams, by Joanna Wiszniewicz (2004).