Olga, Erika, and me

Ilanit-Michele had been born and raised in the Jewish faith. But like her own mother Erika, she felt her faith had been force fed to her by her grandmother, Olga. As a young adult, Ilanit-Michele chose to minimise the Jewish aspects of her identity, and find her own path.

Then Olga’s memoir resurfaced in a box after her death, its first page specifically dedicated to her daughter and granddaughter. It told a tale of growing up in 1930s Hungary, surviving years in Auschwitz and other camps, and discovering at the war’s end that her family had been almost completely obliterated. Olga had never revealed the full story to anyone during her lifetime, and the manuscript had lain in its box for over twenty years.

Moved by the discovery, Ilanit-Michele and her mother began absorbing the story. They had it translated from Hungarian, went to visit the locations it mentioned and recorded the impact it had on their own views of family, history, faith and identity. Through travel, dialogue, interviews and reading out excerpts of Olga’s story, the lives of these three generations of women were rebraided, the tapestry of the family repaired and its Jewish heritage reconsidered.

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