Book review: “Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust” by Brooke Randel

In 1944, at the age of 13, Brooke Randel’s grandmother Golda Indig was with her older sister in the German death camp of Auschwitz.  They had been separated from the rest of their family, most of whom had been shunted to the crematoriums.

A Polish lady in their group of prisoners told them: “You smell that?  Your families, they burning there!”

This is how Golda remembered it in her old age during recorded interviews with Randel, recollections that serve as the core of Randel’s compelling and emotionally nuanced dual-memoir Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust, just published by Chicago-based Tortoise Books.

In those interviews, Golda speaks with a garbled grammar that is like a broken mirror, reflecting, as if in shards, the trauma that she underwent.  Such as this example:

All of a sudden, they say, I have a group and they go in the other building.  Neighbor building, you know? OK.  So me and my sister, we go back there in the neighbor building and from there, they picked out people to go to work.  One by one, everybody went and say nothing.  We had to go.

Finally, again they examine people who going: right, left, right, left.  I was the youngest, the skinniest.  They pushed me to the left to be burned.

 

“To be burned”

Consider that last sentence: “They pushed me to the left to be burned.” In 2015, when Golda began telling Randel about the terror of her Holocaust, she had been living with that memory for seventy years.

New to the camp, Golda had already learned what it meant to be put into the wrong line.  Being put in the wrong line was a tragedy that was repeated endlessly at Auschwitz and at other Nazi death camps.  But Golda created a different fate.

First, a woman, possibly the Polish woman, signaled Golda to sneak back into her sister’s line.  Then, there was another division of the group, and the girl was again put in a line to the crematorium. So, Golda ran away and hid.

Golda hid until she could sneak into her sister’s work group, and, as Golda told Randel: “And my sister, she saw me there.  I pinched her to be quiet. I am also here.”

 

Hiding in a death camp

Let’s stop for a moment again.

Golda, the thin, skinny teenager, found a way to escape being killed by hiding in a death camp, as an unofficial body among the bodies of workers. And, when her sister’s group was moved to a munitions factory, Golda hid within the new camp for months, always in danger of being discovered by the Germans, sneaking in to sleep on a bunk near her sister. Randel writes:

She hid outside buildings, in the bathrooms, underneath furniture, behind supplies, wherever she could tuck herself away and go unnoticed.  She went from thirteen years old to fourteen crouched in a ball. 

Randel was a few years out of college, living in Philadelphia, working as a copywriter, when Golda, her Bubbie, said to her in one of their frequent phone calls, “You should write about my life.”

Again, in the next call, Golda said, “You should write about me. You know, a young girl in the camps…How she survived.  You could sell it.”  And it went like that for months until Randel agreed to fly to Florida for a visit.

 

“The Nazis came down the street”

Golda could not tell her own story.

Despite her success in real estate and investing, despite her ability to speak six languages, she was unable, apparently because of her trauma in the camps, to ever learn how to read and write.  So, Randel began videotaping interviews with her in her Fort Lauderdale condo.  And, within the first minutes, Golda said:

…the Nazis came down the street. And in every house, they take.  They tell all the Jews.  Out of the house, get out of the house.  In German.  You must leave your house. Get out. Leave nothing in your hands.

 

Reliving the war

During these interviews, Randel writes, Golda would move “from raw distress to bitter anger to a kind of wretchedness I’ve never known.”  She was reliving the war in her head in order to describe what happened.

She re-heard the voices, loud and vicious, spittle on their statements, and saw the sunken faces of neighbors she had once known well.  She re-felt the sting of cold against her arms and held herself, trying to stay warm…

The trauma came back to her in clear and vivid waves while the words for it lagged behind, a permanent delay.

For Randel, it was an unexpected flood of feelings, images and memories, jumbled up, disjointed.  “We were both in a trance of sorts, held captive by the horrors of the past, by the way her memories bled into each other, one after another after another.”

 

A testament and a catalyst

Her interviews with Golda led Randel on a multi-year search for information about the places where her grandmother was captive and about her Bubbie’s life after the camps.  Also Here is not only a story the horrors of Golda’s Holocaust but also an account of her triumph of survival as a beacon of good humor and good cooking for those around her.

Randel’s book is a testament to the full life of her grandmother, and, in its preparation, Also Here was a catalyst to bring the two women, one young, one old, closer, tighter, deeply connected by the gifts each gave — Golda giving Randel herself in the form of memories, Randel giving herself in the form of listening.

Golda, who died on April 28, 2022, had been in pain for decades, writes Randel, her early years buried away, robbed of her humanity.  Then, in her mid-80s, she badgered her youngest grandchild, wanting now to tell her story.

She wanted to be heard.  She wanted to be seen, for someone to sit still and listen, to know her and know her pain…Though I never had the words to express it, I also wanted this kind of closeness.  I craved connection with Bubbie and found it hard to come by.

Their conversations about the Holocaust were life-giving.  They deepened the love they had for each other.  And Also Here gives readers a chance to share that life and that love — and to think of how, no matter the circumstances, old and young in a family can enrich each other despite the decades between them.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

12.19.24

This review originally appeared at Third Coast Review on 12.10.24.