The evolution and writing of American Shoes took nearly eight years, a wild, enlightening, gut-wrenching, and unexpected journey into my family’s past. It was a venture that began rather innocently, in 2012, when I took a German friend up on her offer to come visit her in Munich.
We traveled to five countries over the course of a month, visiting Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy, and the Czech Republic. For me, the most important site we visited was my mother’s childhood home of Breslau, now Wroclaw, Poland. From there, we traveled on to the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial, just outside of modern-day Krakow.
I cannot easily express how my trip through eastern Europe affected me. Driving through the flowering, early summer landscape, I could feel the ghosts of my mother’s past. Burned out vestiges of the war were still strewn about the countryside. Machinery, vehicles, discarded weaponry, and abandoned buildings had been left as haunting reminders, frozen in time. In Auschwitz, the bizarre and sadistic inventions of murder and genocide that had left over one million dead were still covered with grime and soot. It was not that long ago.
For days the air felt heavy. Included in my thoughts of those murdered was my daughters’ great grandfather’s family. The evocative and unsettling imagery from my time in Europe left an indelible imprint within me. Those haunting images are forever embedded in my mind, never to be forgotten. How could they be?
In the winter of 2015–2016, after three years of grappling with the often-painful insights of my trip, I assigned my next mission: Mom, I am going to take some of these demons from you; I will battle them alongside you. My mother, silent about the war for her entire life, started talking, spurred on by the stories of my trip. Little by little, her memories began to unlock from the mental boxes that had held them in check, unable to be contained any longer.
A skinny fifteen-year-old who looked more like an eleven- or twelve- year-old the day she arrived in New York Harbor, my mother fought the enduring grip of perhaps the world’s most heinous war her entire life. Grappling with not only the suppressed horror of the war’s atrocities, for eight decades she also struggled with feelings of abandonment, insecurity, self-doubt, and an inability to cry and grieve. She never gave up faith, however, telling me that one day she would one day overcome the darkness, find her way out of the maze of traumatic memories, and in that quest, step out into the light.
It is a purpose of this website to help show that the ghosts of history are always with us, that we should and must respect and learn from the lessons of the past lest we fall prey to hatred and conflict all over again, and block our to own path to compassion and evolutionary growth. Some may say this is exceptionally naïve, and that conflict and division will always be with us, a part of the human condition. But it seems to me that succumbing to that mindset simply keeps all of us imprisoned, by hatred and by fear, blocking any road that might lead us toward compassion, unity, and a secure and enveloping sense of peace.
I hope that American Shoes will serve as a harbinger of sorts, a haunting testament and reminder of a global tragedy we must never forget.