On her mantel, Esther Safran Foer keeps a collection of glass jars filled with dirt and pieces of rubble. These artifacts serve as a tangible reminder of her ancestors' lives in their remote Ukrainian shtetls of Kolki and Trochenbrod, before they were all killed during the Holocaust. Esther's parents, Ethel and Louis Safran, were the only survivors from their large extended families.
Safran Foer's poignant memoir I Want You to Know We're Still Here chronicles her quest to collect the fragments of her personal history and learn the reasons for her parents' silences about their past: "I had grown up surrounded by ghosts--haunted by relatives that were rarely talked about and by the stories that no one would share." When the Germans invaded Kolki in July 1941, 21-year old Ethel Bronstein grabbed her coat and fled without saying goodbye to her mother--a split-second, regrettable decision that she would carry throughout her life.
Esther was named for her two murdered grandmothers, and her earliest memories are of being in a displaced persons camp in Germany with her parents. The family emigrated to Washington, D.C., in 1949. But how her father survived the war would remain a mystery until Esther's mother reveals that a Trochenbrod family had hidden him, and that he once had another wife and daughter.
Through Safran Foer's photographs, scant recollections, connections with experts from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and her travels to Kolki and Trochenbrod, I Want You to Know We're Still Here explores how to remember loved ones when all that is known is a name--and sometimes not even that. --Melissa Firman, writer at melissafirman.com