Saving What Remains
Aug 2009 · Simon and Schuster
2.3star
3 reviewsreport
Ebook
208
Pages
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About this ebook
When Livia Bitton-Jackson returned in 1980 to her childhood town of Samorin, Czechoslovakia, on the Danube River, she was no ordinary tourist: Thirty-six years earlier, as a thirteen-year-old girl in what was then the Hungarian town of Somorja, she and her family had been deported to Auschwitz.
In Saving What Remains, a best-selling memoirist tells a moving and beautifully written story about disinterring the past so that it will never be forgotten. Bitton-Jackson's gripping, present-tense account traces her return to the land she and her Jewish community loved when she was a child, a land that now—decades after the Holocaust's devastation—contained only the remnants of a once-thriving Jewish culture.
What remained in Samorin was a Jewish cemetery where the bodies of Livia's grandparents rested. And yet a new dam on the Danube would soon flood the graveyard, permanently obliterating the last traces of her family's long sojourn in Europe. At her elderly mother's request, Livia and her husband left from Israel on a precarious quest: to exhume the family remains from behind the Iron Curtain—where Communist favors came at a price, and where revelations awaited—and bring them to Israel for reburial. The trip brought back memories both joyful and horrifying for Livia.
Written in the tradition of the Jewish Book Award finalist Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust, Livia Bitton-Jackson's Saving What Remains is a heart-wrenching story of a Holocaust survivor's return to her childhood home decades after surviving Auschwitz. It explores how traces of the Holocaust mark both the landscape and the population despite the utter annihilation of Jewish culture in so much of Europe—while also serving as a poignant and powerful reminder of the debts we owe our ancestors.
In Saving What Remains, a best-selling memoirist tells a moving and beautifully written story about disinterring the past so that it will never be forgotten. Bitton-Jackson's gripping, present-tense account traces her return to the land she and her Jewish community loved when she was a child, a land that now—decades after the Holocaust's devastation—contained only the remnants of a once-thriving Jewish culture.
What remained in Samorin was a Jewish cemetery where the bodies of Livia's grandparents rested. And yet a new dam on the Danube would soon flood the graveyard, permanently obliterating the last traces of her family's long sojourn in Europe. At her elderly mother's request, Livia and her husband left from Israel on a precarious quest: to exhume the family remains from behind the Iron Curtain—where Communist favors came at a price, and where revelations awaited—and bring them to Israel for reburial. The trip brought back memories both joyful and horrifying for Livia.
Written in the tradition of the Jewish Book Award finalist Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust, Livia Bitton-Jackson's Saving What Remains is a heart-wrenching story of a Holocaust survivor's return to her childhood home decades after surviving Auschwitz. It explores how traces of the Holocaust mark both the landscape and the population despite the utter annihilation of Jewish culture in so much of Europe—while also serving as a poignant and powerful reminder of the debts we owe our ancestors.
Ratings and reviews
2.3
3 reviews
About the author
Ms. Bitton-Jackson was born Livia Elvira Freidmann, better known as Elli, on February 28, 1931 in Samorin, a small town in Czechoslovakia, occupied by Hungary in 1938. She spent her childhood there with her parents and her older brother Bubi, at the foot of the Carpathian mountains and one kilometer from the Danube river. Hungarian Jews were lucky, in that Hitler did not catch up to them until 1944, when Elli was 13 years old, and the war was already drawing to a close. But that did not mean that they were not persecuted. On March 25, 1944, schooling for Jewish children was terminated. Jews were forced to wear yellow stars and, steadily, matters worsened. Jews were not allowed to talk, greet or look at gentiles on the street, rendering many friends strangers overnight. Then all the Jews of Samorin, now called Somorja, were deported to Nagymagyar, another town where a ghetto was created for the Jews of her area. Ms. Bitton-Jackson has written schorlarly studies and numerous autobiographical accounts of her experiences, for both children and adult readers. Her publications include __Elli: Coming of Age in the Holocaust__ (Times Books/Random House, 1980) and __Madonna or Courtesan?: The Jewish Woman in Christian Literature__(Seabury Press, 1983; Harper/Row, 1990). Her award-winning titles for children, which have become classics of the genre, include __I Have Lived a Thousand Years: Growing Up in the Holocaust__ (Simon & Schuster, 1997), __My Bridges of Hope__, and __Hello, America: A Refugee's Journey from Auschwitz to the New World__ (Simon & Schuster, 2005). For over thirty years Ms. Bitton-Jackson has written a column on women in Jewish history for the New York weekly, __The Jewish Press.__ Her doctoral dissertation, Zionism in Hungary, was published by Herzl Press. She has also written numerous monographs and chapters in other books. She lives in Israel.
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