SARA'S BOOK BLOG: February 2012

Those of you interested in Genealogy may have seen some articles in the news lately, about the attempted posthumous conversion of well known Holocaust victims such as Anne Frank and parents of well known survivors such as Elie Wiesel.

This is a Mormon practice that troubles many. The LDS church officially promised to end the practice in 1995. In spite of that, there are still a few isolated cases of it happening against the church's stated policy.

As a genealogist who has benefited from the generous help of Mormon volunteers and from the work done by the LDS in rescuing and photocopying and digitizing many many records of Jews in Eastern Europe I find myself very conflicted.

There are millions of Mormons. I suppose the actions of a few extremists, in such a large group, can be understood as hard to prevent totally. According to what I've read, the Church approves it only if done by the descendants of the people being posthumously converted. These descendants then stand in as proxies in the conversion ceremony.

Anne Frank died as a teenager and never had descendants, so there can be no pretense of even following their own rules.

As a Holocaust survivor, and the family member of a number of Holocaust victims, I find the whole idea of "converting" people who were killed because of their religion repugnant. The concept of conversion by someone else's will also makes no sense to me at all.

I wish the LDS leadership would reconsider this practice, as some other past practices have been reconsidered in the past and then changed. I can't view it as anything less than disrespectful and offensive.

Sara Borczuk Applebaum

SURVIVOR

GENEALOGIST

BEARER OF MEMORIES

TELLER OF TALES

Welcome to my blog. You're here because...

A. I invited you and you're a friend or a fellow writer or reader.

B. You've read one or more of my books and want to comment or ask a question or see what I'm up to.

C. You share my interest in genealogy or history or writing or travel.

D. You may be or know a Holocaust survivor and don't want to see the stories lost.

E. You like reading good stories.

F. You heard me speak somewhere and want to know where I'll be next or what my next project is.

G. You want to contribute information or share some news about what's going on in the world related to any of the subjects listed above.

Mechanics: I'm new at this but it seems that the last post appears first. When you get to the end, look for the icon that says "More" or "Older Posts".

Hope you like it. If you know more about blogging than I do (which wouldn't be hard) feel free to make suggestions.

Sara

PRESS RELEASE

RETIRED... TO RESEARCHER... TO WRITER

With time to think and perspective to reflect, local retired educator delves into her family’s dramatic past...from Warsaw to Siberia...from a lumbering camp in the Archangel Forest to Kyrgyzstan.

The generation of survivors of World War II is fast coming to an end and telling its stories is becoming a compelling need. “Baby Boomers, in general, are expressing their need to understand who they are and where they came from.” (Ancestry Magazine Nov. 1999)

“Who Do You Think You Are?” a show on NBC has an audience of between 6,000,000 and 7,000,000 viewers. The Internet and sources like Ancestry.com provide easily available resources to a hungry audience with possibilities they never had before to seek answers to their questions.

One local retiree went from delving into her family’s past to writing its story, published as LOST AND FOUND, A Family Memoir in December 2010. It tells of escaping Warsaw under attack...deportation ... a three month trek in cattle cars to Siberia...her birth in Kyrgyzstan. Not every Holocaust story happened in Concentration Camps. This one included a father fighting with partisans and a mother so desperate to have her children survive that she threatened suicide to have them accepted at an orphanage, where they were less likely to starve.

That book was followed by a work of fiction called POMORSKA STREET just published. Both available in print and E-book on Fastpencil.com and Amazon.com

A World War 2 survivor, anticipating death, passes a debt of honor on to her granddaughter, a duty to remember and honor one who did not stand by in silence the blood of the innocent.

In trying to repay that debt, Clara goes to Poland and there she learns of her grandmother’s gut wrenching experiences as a young teen in the resistance.

People with long memories and longer resentments ensnare her in a dangerous struggle to determine what is true and what is not...who is friend or lover and who is treacherous. ...and how she herself can survive it all.

# # #

CONTACT INFORMATION

Email LAUSDAP@AOL.COM

Sara,

Congratulations on your achievement. You’ve told a haunting story that weaves together the Holocaust, survival, memory, guilt, expiation, legacy, and, in the end, a qualified triumph.

I admire how you’ve taken your own story and imagined it into a fictional one that combines the past and present in a way that will touch many people - people who may know something about the Holocaust, but who see it only as something that happened in the past…a more and more distant past.

And by keeping it so personal, so much a story of a few sharply drawn characters, you have followed in the tradition of The Diary Anne Frank and Schindler’s List. The scale of the Holocaust, like that of so many catastrophes, is literally unimaginable, and people turn away from it. But by focusing on one small story in that terrible time, you have created a reality that everyone can understand and feel, as they read of the near-unbelievable things that happened to people not so different, really, from themselves.

Suzanne Zaharoni
Author of See You Next Time!

FASTPENCIL.COM or AMAZON.COM

Available in Print and E-book

SARA BORCZUK APPLEBAUM

POMORSKA STREET

A World War 2 survivor, anticipating death, passes a debt of honor on to her granddaughter, a duty to remember and honor one who did not stand by in silence the blood of the innocent.

In trying to repay that debt, Clara goes to Poland and there she learns of her grandmother’s gut wrenching experiences as a young teen in the resistance.