Saving What Remains: A Holocaust Survivor's Journey Home to Reclaim Her Ancestry
When Livia Bitton-Jackson returned in 1980 to her childhood town of Samorin, Czechoslovakia, on the Danube River, she was no ordinary tourist: Thirty-six years earlier, as a thirteen-year-old girl in what was then the Hungarian town of Somorja, she and her family had been deported to Auschwitz. InSaving What Remains, a best-selling memoirist tells a moving and beautifully written story about disinterring the past so that it will never be forgotten. Bitton-Jackson’s gripping, present-tense account traces her return to the land she and her Jewish community loved when she was a child, a land that now—decades after the Holocaust’s devastation—contained only the remnants of a once-thriving Jewish culture. What remained in Samorin was a Jewish cemetery where the bodies of Livia’s grandparents rested. And yet a new dam on the Danube would soon flood the graveyard, permanently obliterating the last traces of her family’s long sojourn in Europe. At her elderly mother’s request, Livia and her husband left from Israel on a precarious quest: to exhume the family remains from behind the Iron Curtain—where Communist favors came at a price, and where revelations awaited—and bring them to Israel for reburial. The trip brought back memories both joyful and horrifying for Livia. Written in the tradition of the Jewish Book Award finalistMotherland: Beyond the Holocaust, Livia Bitton-Jackson’sSaving What Remainsis a heart-wrenching story of a Holocaust survivor’s return to her childhood home decades after surviving Auschwitz. It explores how traces of the Holocaust mark both the landscape and the population despite the utter annihilation of Jewish culture in so much of Europe—while also serving as a poignant and powerful reminder of the debts we owe our ancestors.