Stories of Holocaust Resilience

        Photo of Cherie Goren's Family from her out-of-print book about life in Lithuania

UPDATE: Leah Goren, Cherie's granddaughter, was in the NY Times with her story and her
illustrations based on Cherie's escape from Lithuania. Here is the link:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/opinion/i-want-you-to-remember.html


This is the title of her story and illustrations: 
I Want You to Remember
An illustrated account of my grandmother’s escape from Lithuania as Europe was heading toward the Holocaust.


We are raising $1,000 to cover the costs of self-publishing the incredible stories of two remarkable but unknown  women who fled the Holocaust.

Cherie's father had the foresight and funds to leave Lithuania* right before Hitler took it back, thus saving his family from the ovens. One hard copy survives of the memoir Cherie typed 20 years ago. She is now 93.) Cherie's nephew, Freddie, recently produced a Vimeo about his family that provides background for Cherie's family's safety as well as information about Memel, Lithuania that is worth seeing. Click here  to watch. 

My friend Rina spent part of the war in a Russian detention camp with her mother, a midwife. She was sent to Israel by Kindertransport and eventually migrated to the United States. She started her story and it deserves to be shared widely.

With my writing colleague, Krista Nelson, who handles book design and photo retouching, I plan to publish these two tales of hope and resilience. The costs of editing, developing, formatting, and self-publishing both titles should run approximately $1,000 total. This summer I republished my book,   Flight to Freedom: A Tale from Tarpiluvka** on Amazon's author platform and am confident in our
ability to bring these stories to readers quickly and professionally.

So, if you think that positive stories, rather than horror stories, about immigrants who came to America to flee the Nazis is a worthwhile project, we welcome any amount you are able to contribute. 

In October, my website, www.menupause.info, received 843 unique visitors. If each of you, my readers, contributed a dollar or two, we could get this project off the ground immediately. 

Thank you for your ongoing support of my writing. Comments welcome.

Ellensue

*The November issue of Smithsonian Magazine  has devoted almost the entire magazine to the Holocaust and two diaries recently found, one from Lithuania. The cover's title is "The New Anne Frank," and the story of the young Lithuanian poet, Matilda Olkin, is entitled: "Finding Her Voice." I don't be- lieve in coincidences. This issue of the Smithsonian inspires me to move forward with Cherie's  own Holocaust refugee story of Lithuania and Rina's refugee story from Russia during WWII.

                                                    


**The photo above is my family, from my children's book, Flight to Freedom: A Tale from Tarpiluvka.

It tells, in historical-fiction, about the survival of my mother's family.   My great-great-grandmother   sent her two sons from a shtetl in Russia to the village of Tarpiluvka in then Austria-Hungary to save them from conscription in the Russian Army at ages 9 and 12. They were adopted by a Jewish family in which the wife could not have children and thought the boys' arrival was a miracle. MeMe, who is my mother's mother, is second from right and these are six of her 12 siblings who migrated to the USA  and made a new life here. My goal is to help others with resilience tell their stories.