When someone else has a lasting interest in your story, you start to think that it is perhaps, interesting.

This Radio Feature was created by a Danish friend, Ann Elisabeth Jessen.

We share the same first and middle names, we are the same age, and we live similar lives.  I have taken to calling her Pandora.  She made this feature, emphasizing my late-in-coming knowledge that my family was Jewish, and she found and showed me the death certificate of my great-grandfather:  9 July, 1943.  Ghetto Theresienstadt. Grandma had not told us this.

We traveled to Bzionkow, in Silesia, in December of 2013 where Pandora and her Polish colleague, Monika Hemperek from Lublin, researched and recorded the radio drama about my return to Bzionkow.

Bzionkow is a charismatic agricultural estate where my grandmother grew up and my father played as a boy until his family, all but his grandparents, fled to the USA in 1939.  They came to New York City where my father finished high school.   No one spoke about being Jewish.  I grew up around German refugees celebrating Christmas.

I never thought of claiming this property.  But I do want to see it get a new life.

Original material:
Radio Shows by Lisbeth Jessen at
deutschlandradiokultur.de/ursendung-guten-tag-auf-polnisch.958.de.html?dram:article_id=293089
The Polish version by Monika Hemperek at
moje.radio.lublin.pl/21-10-2014-reportaz-cafe-reportaz-lisbeth-jessen-i-moniki-hemperek-guten-tag-po-polsku.html