Julie Brill is the author of the new memoir Hidden in Plain Sight: A Family Memoir and the Untold Story of the Holocaust in Serbia. Brill, who is also a doula, has written the book Round the Circle: Doulas Share Their Experiences. She lives in the Boston area.
Q: What inspired you to write Hidden in Plain Sight, and how much did you know about your father's story as you were growing up?
A: My father told me his war stories from the time I was little. His early childhood memories were vivid, like short movie clips, so I could easily see his experiences through his eyes.
I could imagine what it was like for him to run through the streets holding his mother’s hand as they heard the terrible whistling of the German bombs overhead. I could see myself perched on an older cousin’s shoulders, making our way along the railroad tracks out of the bombed-out city.
As is common in the families of Holocaust survivors, I learned from specific stories first and then tried to plug them into the larger historical narrative.
However, because my family was from Yugoslavia, it was hard to learn that larger narrative. We mostly hear stories from survivors, so we know the events in Poland, Germany, and Hungary. So few Jews from Belgrade survived to pass down their memories. So, the story of the Holocaust in Serbia is mostly untold.
In Serbia, most Jews were murdered before Hitler’s Final Solution. My grandfather, like most of the Jewish men from Belgrade, was murdered before the U.S. even entered the war.
This isn’t a story of cattle cars or gas chambers. My family wasn’t unusual, most of the Jews in Eastern Europe were murdered by bullets close to where they lived. But we don’t hear much about that part. That’s why I wrote Hidden in Plain Sight.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: Research was challenging because there just isn’t much available on the history of the Holocaust in Serbia.
I started by getting family documents from the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade, which was exciting because I could see generations of Brills in the records, starting with my great-great-grandfather, who came with his wife and children from what is now Slovakia.
I received all these birth certificates, for example, and the last one was for my father, who was born in 1938, less than three years before the start of the occupation.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum was helpful, and they expedited their research because I was requesting with my father and there’s a special channel for survivors. They called me within a day or two of receiving my request. They provided information only recently made available from the Arolsen Archives in Germany.
One surprise was how accurate my father’s memories were because he was so young. His earliest memory is the German bombing of Belgrade and he wasn’t even 3 years old. Everything he’d said fit into the historical record. It was satisfying for both of us to learn the larger stories behind his flashbulb memories.
I also learned family history we hadn’t known, that was essentially stolen from us by the Nazis, that I could return to my father.
Q: The writer Menachem Kaiser said of the book, “In quiet, lovely prose, Julie Brill has delivered a powerful reminder of why our stories—personal, familial, historical—are so crucial. A moving excavation of a family story.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love Menachem’s book Plunder for the way he captured a true-life story of a Holocaust descendant that is engrossing and, in some ways almost unbelievable. He shows how history is never over; each generation continues to interact in different ways with the past.
I’m grateful for what he wrote about Hidden in Plain Sight because his words reflect what I was trying to accomplish. I didn’t want to write something that was overacted or overblown.
I wanted to show why discovering my family’s story helped me understand my father and myself. I wanted the reader to see how the lives of ordinary people are important. To me, ordinary people, not kings and generals, make historical accounts interesting.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: Hidden in Plain Sight tells my journey to uncover family secrets and stories. I hope that readers will consider their own family histories, talk to older family members, discover what documents are available to them. Everyone’s ancestors lived through history.
I think sometimes we think of history as something static, but the experiences I write about are of discovering more history. I accessed documents that weren’t available even a few years earlier.
The information I found and our trips to Serbia helped my father recall memories he couldn’t access before. We found family we hadn’t known existed who had more documents and photographs. I felt I was returning family history to my father and to my whole family that the Nazis had stolen.
Also, we are living through history now, so we need to pay attention and act. When we discuss the Holocaust, we say “never again.” What does that mean when genocides continue to happen?
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I started writing this memoir in 2017, before the events in the book conclude, so it gestated for seven years. Now that it’s out in the world, my focus is on promotion. I wrote so the story of the Serbian Jews would be known, not just my ancestors, but also those who have no descendants to remember and retell.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Thank you for interviewing me! I’d be happy to Zoom into your readers’ book clubs. More information on Hidden in Plain Sight and my in-person and virtual event schedule is at www.JulieBrill.com. My book launch is May 7 at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Find me on Instagram @juliesbrill.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment