Curiosity Strikes

I was in Ms. Henson's fourth grade class, studying everything from melting ice cube science to oceanography to archeology. Sometime in November, we reached a biography unit. What was a biography? A description of a person, a life story, a life story of someone else, an academic paper on some type of accomplishment? In order to learn more about our own definitions, we were assigned to choose anyone we knew that was able to schedule an interview with us to work on telling a story and letting us write a biography of their lives. For this reason, Ms. Henson told us the person had to be alive and easily contacted over phone/email/in person. I thought about this for a while. I guess I could call my voice instructor...she'd probably have some good stories about her schooling. Or my mom's mom, considering the fact that I didn't know enough about her life as it was, especially for being her only granddaughter. There were always my parents, but, bo-ring! After long deliberation, I felt like the only thing to do was ask Ms. Henson for an exception.

By far, the one most interesting person with the single most miraculous story I'd ever heard was my grandfather, who had passed away years before. I hadn't ever heard his story through his words--just passed from my dad with some exaggerations and underestimations here and there. I knew this would be a good story to tell--the one of him escaping from the Holocaust, into America, the land of the free.

When I was born a couple years after my older cousin Sarah, my parents and her's decided that it would be important to get a video recording of my Grandpa Fred, talking about his experiences during the Holocaust, from start to finish. It was like a visual history, made to help us, the youth, understand and remember the things he and so many others went through during the 1940s. Though our education was the driving factor behind the desire for this video, I also think my dad and his sister, Aunt Ruthie, wanted to hear the story for themselves. Grandpa never talked about it. He was an American now, he was proud of it, and he didn't want to burden his children as they were growing up with the horrors of what he had been through at their age and younger. The whole family sat down and, with me as a one-year-old crying in the background, began to film the history in a couple-hour period.

I watched the video for the first time in fourth grade after Ms. Henson approved my idea for using it as a sort of "interview." Lying in the dark on the floor of my parents' bedroom, I teared up and wondered how something as insignificant as a computer screen could induce such emotion. My dad came in and watched with me during parts of the video, and I remember wondering how even he, such a strong figure in my life, could get so emotional over this. The only more emotional event was the first time I'd ever seen Dad cry, on the morning of Grandpa's death in 2001.

I took notes on the video, and I wrote my paper. It was simple, didn't take much time, and I got an A. It came naturally to me, giving the stories of my Grandfather's life and adding some reflection here and there. I thought it was simple at least. Next time that I visited Grandma Ruby in the nursing home, my mom made me bring the paper to show her. I complained and said it wouldn't mean anything, embarrassed to give my fourth grade writing piece (which even I, still as a fourth grader, knew was primitive) to someone who knew much more about essays. That changed when I watched Grandma tear up over the biography, and follow by hanging it on her bedroom wall until the day that she passed away there.

It was then that I realized how my writing could affect people, and how my Grandpa Fred's story should be documented for the entire world to learn from. I didn't realize, back then, the holes in the video leaving out information we'd need to really understand his journey. I'm still figuring it out, with my family, as we travelled around Europe this summer trying to retrace his steps and fill in the blanks. It's a work in progress, but is already helping me learn so much about the overall picture of the Holocaust and WWII in Nazi Germany, but also about my ancestors, their families, my Grandfather, and even the lives of my Dad and Aunt.

Even without conclusion, the embarkment on this journey we are about to begin is bringing my family closer already.