Remember Me.
This is a story about a woman that I know. She is a woman that I have loved and still do love, because when love is real it stays in your heart no matter how far the distance and no matter how long the time. I don’t speak to her anymore, but she was a part of my family for many years. I called her Grandma Marian.
She is my ex-husband’s grandma and she is a beautiful woman. Someone once told me that beautiful people don’t just happen. They said beautiful people are made by finding their way out of depths. Marian is a beautiful woman.
I remember her being bold and wise and bright, she is many things. She is an artist and I adored that part of her. Her poetry took my breath away. She is a devoted mother, a loving grandmother and a wife. Marian is also a Holocaust survivor.
I hope you take a moment and breathe that in, feel it.
She is a Holocaust survivor.
She endured great suffering and abuse and she watched as her family was ripped away from her and murdered in the most horrible ways. But I remember when she talked about life, she would say things like “this happened for a reason,” or, “ I believe the soul lives on.”
I remember her smile and her joy and the way she welcomed me into her family and how I would have never known from her how much pain and loss she had endured in her childhood or in her adulthood, because she told another story, one of resilience and faith. She was authentically joyful and loving. She was wise. She was a seeker of her own soul and she taught me something so big that I didn’t understand it at first. She taught me forgiveness.
She wrote a book in 2009 in hopes that telling her whole story would ensure that we all remember what happened to her and six million others, so that it would never happen again.
Marian is a storyteller and a teacher, I hope you learn something from her story. I hope you answer her call if only by reading the title.
The book is called, “Remember Me: A Holocaust Survivor’s Story” by Marian Kampinski.
xo,
Diana
