Dreaming of the River, by Pauline Steinhorn
As the last survivors of the Holocaust pass away, it’s now left to their children and grandchildren to tell their stories. Documentary filmmaker Pauline Steinhorn typed the pages of her mother’s handwritten memoir and promised to publish it. And then going through her mother’s papers, she found the journal kept by her grandmother. Mother and daughter, Bronia and teenage Hajuta, survived through war’s end at Bergen Belsen.
Working with those texts, Steinhorn crafted a hybrid of back-and-forth accounts between a woman age 30 and a girl age 10 when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. They had always lived with antisemitism, but now they faced a highly-organized, state-run campaign to deprive them of human dignity—even before they were transplanted to labor camps. Their family members were killed, yet they survived. Bronia took initiative to act as the nurse in the slave labor factory where they were confined, sometimes with the aid of sympathetic Poles and Nazis moved occasionally by conscience.
Steinhorn deliver Bronia and Hajuta’s memories with minimal literary intervention in a moving account of human resilience.
Get Dreaming of the River on Amazon here.
Paid link
