My Mother’s War, and Her Victory
A Story of Memory and Goodness, Resurrected
There is a photograph on page 167 of The Family of Man, Edward Steichen’s great 1955 collection of images from sixty-eight countries. It was taken in the Warsaw Ghetto by an unknown German photographer and later entered as evidence at Nuremberg. People are being marched down a street at gunpoint. On the facing page, a line from George Sand: Humanity is outraged in me and with me. We must not dissimulate nor try to forget this indignation, which is one of the most passionate forms of love.
I was six, maybe seven, when I found that page.
The book belonged to my mother, Elaine. She was Polish — wholly Polish, her family from Lodz and Warsaw — and she was, by the time I knew her, a woman whom life had worn down badly. My children, decades later, would know her only as a drunk lady. That was true, and it was not the whole truth. Her high school yearbook describes a young woman of talent and accomplishment. Her hand-tinted graduation portrait shows careful waves, a lace collar, and a gaze fixed on something just out of frame.
She ached for connection to life and mostly could not find it.
But she let a small child see that book. And when I stopped at that page and asked her what was happening, she did not turn it, and she did not lie. She told me, in words a child could hold, how the Nazis had made a hell for Jewish people. Streets she told me about were streets her own family had come from.
It would be years before I understood what that conversation cost her, and what it defied. Her own father was antisemitic. So was the man she married - in fact, suspicious of anyone who was not “white.” She lived between those two facts her whole life, mostly in silence. But not that day. My sister tells me that Mom once confided she wished she were Jewish. She never said it to me. She didn’t have to. She had already handed me the page.
A friendship soon gave the lesson flesh. At seven, I befriended a boy named Jeffrey Zimmerman, whose family welcomed me to their Shabbat table. I came home full of questions, and my mother was ready with more of the story. History, conscience, and a candlelit Friday evening braided themselves together in me, and never came undone.
Thirty years later, I was a docent and volunteer with the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois — the survivor-built institution in Skokie that grew from a storefront into what is now the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center. I was part of a small team supporting survivors and administrators during testimony work in the early 1990s, in the years just before Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation took up the same urgent task on a global scale. I handled photographs and documents, some purely archival, many heartrending. I told myself I was fine. Looking back, I absorbed more than I knew. But I pressed forward, because it seemed to me that if survivors could speak, the least the rest of us could do was make ourselves capable of hearing — to become, even secondhand, witnesses.
I came to know remarkable people there. Erna Gans, the Foundation’s founder, a survivor who turned the outrage of attempted Nazi marches in Skokie into an institution of memory. And Werner Ellman, a German-born American veteran whose own brother had served in the German army — two sons of one divided family, in two opposing uniforms. I was dumbstruck by that then. I think of it differently now, in this fractured historical moment: families and nations split against themselves are not an aberration of that war. They are a recurring human condition, and tragically, ours.
In 1995, for the D-Day anniversary, I was asked to speak at a symposium alongside survivors, clergy, and local officials. Afterward, we gathered for a photograph at the Warsaw Ghetto memorial on Skokie’s Village Green — in front of the bronze statue of a Jewish family from the 1943 uprising, dedicated in 1987 in a village dense with survivors. Standing with us were veterans of the Nisei unit, Japanese American soldiers who helped liberate Dachau while their own families were interned by the country they served. Liberators before a monument to the uprising, in a town that had faced down Nazi marchers. I am the young woman in black near the center of the photograph.
I no longer have my speech. I remember its theme — interspiritual, transnational accountability for one another — and I remember the sensation at the podium that I was not speaking for myself. The words I quoted were Terrence Des Pres’s: To be on the side of the victim is to be on the side of life, which is what morality in practice comes down to.
I did not know yet how literally my life would follow that line. Years later I married a Jewish man, and shortly after, I converted — not out of religious conviction, exactly. Marc isn’t religious. I simply did not want him to stand alone in his heritage, whatever came.
Only later did the symmetry surface: my mother had wished to be Jewish and could not say so aloud in her world. Her daughter became Jewish, freely, for love. A wish fulfilled one generation late.
This is why I say the Shoah was, in a strange and private way, my mother’s war. Not because she fought in it — she was a girl in America while her ancestral cities burned. But because she fought its long aftermath inside her own house: against her father’s prejudice, her husband’s narrowness, and her own despair.
Her weapon was one honest conversation with a six-year-old, over an open book.
She lost most of her battles. Addiction took nearly everything from her, including, for a long time, her children’s full regard. But that one act of moral courage outlived all her defeats. It became a docent’s years of witness, a podium in Skokie, a conversion, a chaplaincy, and decades of sitting with the grieving. It became this essay.
That was her war. This — all of it — is her victory.
For Elaine Camille Goszczynski. Humanity was outraged in her, and with her. She did not dissimulate. And indignation, as George Sand knew, is one of the most passionate forms of love.