Florence Lieblich She was 17 years old when the Nazis invaded her hometown on July 6, 1941. “From that day on, hell began,” she recalls. Lieblich and other Jews like her were targeted. The Holocaust – the genocide of more than 6 million European Jews – is taking place. For the next three years, every day was a struggle to survive. IN her memoirs, Lieblich described the horror she experienced in her city, then Czortków, Poland, but now part of Ukraine. “Jews were taken to the outskirts of town,” she wrote. “They have to dig their own graves before they get shot and fall into it.” Lieblich and her family hid it as best they could. She would risk her life to bring them food. “If people saw a Jew buying from a Gentile, they would kill them on the spot,” she recalls. “This happened. We had to eat. I myself took off my captaincy with the Star (of David), and just went to get a loaf of bread. We were starving.” At one point, she was attacked by a dog she said was trained to hurt Jews. “The dog bit my hand, crushed my hand and fingers,” she wrote. The attack left her with scars and disfigured hands and fingers, but she survived. Her father, a rabbi, married her to her friend Philip, and the couple fled at the urging of their family, the couple moved to another hiding place and survived until Soviet troops liberated the city in March 1944. They later emigrated to Czechoslovakia Germany, and eventually the United States, but many of their relatives, including their parents, died in the Holocaust. after the war only 80 people survived,” wrote Lieblich. Lieblich died in Dix Hills, New York in 2017, aged 94. Her granddaughter Emily Steinberger feel a regret. Steinberger said she wished she had talked to her great-grandmother more and listened to more of her stories before she died. “It’s just a reflection point,” said Steinberger, a photojournalism student about to graduate from Syracuse University. “A lot of people in my family who went through all of this are no longer here. And this is not just me. Unfortunately, this is a generation of Holocaust survivors who won’t be here much longer. And it’s like a now or never situation.” For her honors thesis, Steinberger made a picture book to document her family’s story. Both sides of her family are Jewish and emigrated from Europe during the Holocaust. Lieblichs sided with her mother. Her paternal grandmother, Erica, fled Germany with her brother Werner, settling in Ecuador before coming to New York. It was there that she met her husband, Ralph, who came to the United States in 1936 and served in the US Army during World War II. Steinberger never knew many Holocaust survivors in her family, as they died before she was born or shortly after. “The numbers[of Holocaust survivors]continue to dwindle and it feels like the clock is running out to get the story right,” she said. “It’s part of my urgency in doing this right now.” Steinberger’s book titled L’dor V’dor, Hebrew for “from generation to generation”. Inside the book are archived photographs of the Steinberger family as well as letters, telegrams, official documents and handwritten notes. “I am very fortunate that my family has done a great job of preserving all of this,” says Steinberger. “At my grandparents’ house, I went through the boxes and all these documents look like Saran wrapped and layered in plastic sheets. … They did a wonderful job of preserving everything.” The project also includes quotes from Lieblich’s Memoirs, “Someone is watching me,” and an interview she gave before her death. Steinberger writes: “This book tells our story, a document of our history. “This book is our memory.” Throughout the book there are also many preserved flowers and foliage. That’s what Steinberger’s mother, an art teacher, always does in old books, and Steinberger feels it’s the right thing to do here because she’s preserving the family’s history just as she told her to. preserved flowers. The placement of the different flowers also adds meaning at many points. In the book’s cover art, seen at the beginning of this story, the flowers obscure the faces of Lieblich and her young daughter Gloria, Steinberger’s grandmother. The purpose of the masking and anonymity, Steinberger explained, was to show that this is the story of many Jews who escaped persecution during the Holocaust. In another page of the book, a fern blankets Efraim, Phillip Lieblich’s brother, illustrating how he did not survive the war. Another page shows ivy leaves surrounding Florence, Philip and others in a bunker, with faces barely peeking out. This is done to symbolize what life in hiding is like. “My hope is that if and when I go to Germany or Ecuador or Poland, I can also collect some flowers and leaves from those places and include them in this project,” says Steinberger. Steinberger hopes her book and the story of her family can inspire other Holocaust survivors and their descendants to tell their stories before they are lost forever. It’s important to remember, she said, the horrors of the Holocaust — and the struggle families like hers went through to survive. “Those are definitely stories of perseverance. They are also stories of change. When these tremendous changes happen in your life, how do you adjust and keep moving forward?” she speaks. Recent news has shown that today there are still lessons to be learned. Anti-Semitism Incident in the United States reached the highest level last year since the Anti-Defamation League began recording them in 1979. “Unfortunately, anti-Semitism is alive and well,” says Steinberger. “We had a few incidents around my high school and around my neighborhood where the swastika was drawn on concrete or on buildings. I think there’s even one that looks like it’s been spray-painted on a tree. And then at the university too, there was a swastika drawn in the snow.” Steinberger personally edited her book, and she says she’d love to have it published one day. She saw the former as a project that she would continue throughout her life. “We repeat the phrase ‘never forget,'” she says in the book, “and for the sake of Holocaust survivors like my great-grandparents, we won’t.”
