A Grandson’s Memoir of the Holocaust
A memoir shedding light on the silence that kept generations apart.
The author’s German-born parents seldom spoke of the Holocaust but a monochrome portrait in the dining room hinted at a connection to a dark past. After his father’s death, a chance discovery lifts the veil of silence, revealing the two ghosts in the photo not as hapless victims but as grandparents who would have loved him had they not been murdered in a concentration camp.
Theirs is a tale of unfathomable loss and a race against time but also of quiet resistance and resilience that would shape his parents’ lives—and his own—in ways he could never have understood. What redeems this tragedy, is the element of rebirth.
As he painstakingly reconstructed his Jewish grandparents’ perilous existence after the Nazis stole everything from them, three men in his father’s hometown enlisted him in their effort to right the historical wrong visited on the Schönwald family decades ago. Joining forces, the activists and the author provide his grandparents an afterlife, as it were, denied to millions of forgotten Holocaust victims.
LAUNCHED: 9 November 2024
The son of Holocaust survivors and grandson of Holocaust victims, Kenneth D. Wald served six years as director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. He spent four years on the state of Florida’s Task Force on Holocaust Education and co-founded and directed the Summer Holocaust Institute for Florida Teachers. In 2011, he was named the University of Florida Teacher-Scholar of the Year, the highest honor given to a faculty member. His most recent book, The Foundations of American Jewish Liberalism, won the 2020 National Jewish Book Award.
