Thank you all who have followed this journey with me for the past 8+ years
This is the beginning of my book.
by
Terri Hanauer-Brahm on Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 6:22am
My journey to learn my heritage:
As I grew up, I had questions about my family. I knew my family was from Germany, but other than that, not much else. The only members of my family from Germany that were still alive would not open up to me about what happened to my family during the holocaust that occurred in Europe.
My Father, Uri Hanauer was born in Berlin, Germany on February 6, 1940. I had no idea that he was a holocaust survivor until after his death on December 5, 1981. My grandmother pulled me aside at my father’s memorial service and told me that she and my father had been in a concentration camp during WWII. She said she needed to tell me this so I would understand why my father was never open with me about his childhood. I asked her the name of the camp and she would not tell me.
In 2002 my grandfather’s sister, Ilse had told me the name of the camp that my father, grandmother and great grandfather were taken to. It was Terezin (Theresienstadt) located in the Czech Republic. I started looking on the web for information on Theresienstadt and learned there was a museum in Israel that had the records of when people were transported to the camp. I had contacted the museum and they sent me copies of the transport documents for both my father and my grandmother. This was the beginning of my quest to learn the whole truth about my family’s survival during the holocaust. The only problem was that the 3 members of my family who had survived were now all deceased.
I then started sending emails to various German agencies on what I knew about my family, which at this point was very little. Fortunately my great aunt Ilse had given me names of some of my relatives just before her death in 2002.
I started out by not knowing anything about my family!:
I have learned the following from documents I have obtained from many agencies around the world starting in 2003. The notebook that holds these documents is 5” thick and filled. I have added another note book with correspondences I have had with The International Red Cross, historians, authors and German’s who knew my family during the war:
Interview about my journey:
http://irememberitlikeitwasyesterday.blogspot.com/2009/07/interview-about-my-family-and-holocaust.html
