A World Erased

A Grandson's Search for His Family's Holocaust Secrets

Noah Lederman

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2017
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781442267442
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

This poignant memoir by Noah Lederman, the grandson of Holocaust survivors, transports readers from his grandparents' kitchen table in Brooklyn to World War II Poland. In the 1950s, Noah's grandparents raised their children on Holocaust stories. But because tales of rebellion and death camps gave his father and aunt constant nightmares, in Noah's adolescence Grandma would only recount the PG version. Noah, however, craved the uncensored truth and always felt one right question away from their pasts. But when Poppy died at the end of the millennium, it seemed the Holocaust stories died with him. In the years that followed, without the love of her life by her side, Grandma could do little more than mourn.

After college, Noah, a travel writer, roamed the world for fifteen months with just one rule: avoid Poland. A few missteps in Europe, however, landed him in his grandparents' country. When he returned home, he cautiously told Grandma about his time in Warsaw, fearing that the past would bring up memories too painful for her to relive. But, instead, remembering the Holocaust unexpectedly rejuvenated her, ending five years of mourning her husband. Together, they explored the memories—of Auschwitz and a half-dozen other camps, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the displaced persons camps—that his grandmother had buried for decades. And the woman he had playfully mocked as a child became his hero.

I was left with the stories—the ones that had been hidden, the ones that offered catharsis, the ones that gave me a second hero, the ones that resurrected a family, the ones that survived even death. Their shared journey profoundly illuminates the transformative power of never forgetting.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Chapter 1: The Holocaust through Nightmares
• Chapter 2: Super Poppy and the Meshugge Grandma
• Chapter 3: The Hospital
• Chapter 4: Keys to the Holocaust Vault
• Chapter 5: Adrift
• Chapter 6: Death in the Czech Republic
• Chapter 7: The E-mail
• Chapter 8: Otwock
• Chapter 9: From Night to Dawn
• Chapter 10: Peering into the Vault
• Chapter 11: The Tapes
• Chapter 12: Panama
• Chapter 13: Escape from Warsaw
• Chapter 14: Revision
• Chapter 15: A Box of Photos
• Chapter 16: The Four Questions
• Chapter 17: Israel
• Chapter 18: Research at Yad Vashem
• Chapter 19: Nearly Unraveled
• Chapter 20: The Boy at the Gates of Warsaw
• Chapter 21: Lightning Lad
• Chapter 22: Escape from Treblinka
• Chapter 23: The Liquidation
• Chapter 24: Grandma’s Determination
• Chapter 25: Get Well Soon
• Chapter 26: The Bronze Arm
• Chapter 27: Bergen-Belsen
• Chapter 28: Better and You Better
• Chapter 29: Umschlagplatz
• Chapter 30: The Mystery Camp
• Chapter 31: A Return to the Camps
• Chapter 32: Majdanek
• Chapter 33: Birkenau
• Chapter 34: Auschwitz
• Chapter 35: The Buna
• Chapter 36: Liberation
• Chapter 37: In Search of New Beginnings
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Sources
• About the Author