Our volunteer writing partners are people of different ages, life stages and religious, cultural and education backgrounds. They share the desire to learn more about the Holocaust and support survivors in telling their stories in the manner that was meaningful to them.
I will start at the end, not unlike the survivors who told me their stories. Mary Gale, a woman who honoured with me her trust, asked the question “how did you know?” when I finished reading her the completed manuscript of her Holocaust memoir. I answered that she had told me everything that I had written. She further commented that I had taken the stories “out of [her] head” and made sense of them. This was an amazing moment for me as a listener, recorder and transcriber of her story. Mary had lived a double life for about seventy years. She was relieved that she had finally “told the truth” and was hopeful about moving forward honestly with her friends and family. It was a privilege to wait with her for memories to surface in the gaps outside of the well-worn narrative grooves she had shared up until that point. I am grateful for her trust.
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