As a kid, I adored my grandfather. I knew he loved chocolate (the dark kind) and hated ketchup. I knew he enjoyed a good pun and could speak seven languages — around the dinner table it was French.
I knew his Steinway was his happy place, and that he made many of the things in his home by hand (like the curtains that hung in his living room, woven on a loom he built in his basement). What I didn’t know about my grandfather was that he grew up one of five siblings in a town in central Poland called Radom; or that he was raised in the Jewish faith; or that he, his parents and his siblings were Holocaust survivors. These were truths I learned at 15, a year after he died, thanks to a high school English assignment and an interview with my grandmother Caroline.
The discovery sparked a lot of questions. Six years later, my curiosity was further piqued at a family reunion, where I found myself sitting around a table listening to stories about the war. They were unlike any I’d ever heard before — a baby born in Siberia, a hike over the Austrian Alps, a mother-daughter escape from the ghetto.
At the end of the night, my great-aunt Felicia, who was a year old at the start of the war, looked around at her cousins and said, “It’s a miracle that we’re all here today. .” It was at that Kurc family gathering that I realized someone needed to write our story down.
Eventually, I decided that someone would be me. I set off with a digital voice recorder and a belly full of butte.
