The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Remembering & forgetting: a memoir and other pieces of my life by Miriam Spiegel Raskin is a short but impactful book by a woman who, in 1939, at the age of eight, fled Germany with her parents, Julius and Fannie Spiegel, in the wake of Kristallnacht. Most of the rest of her family did not survive the war. The trauma of Nazi Germany and brutal persecution of Jews left lasting scars for the rest of her life.

Relocated eventually to St. Louis, Missouri, Miriam, a refugee, always felt an outsider, different, in pain and insecure. She grew into a deep thinker – a published writer, poet and essayist. She wrote beautifully, grappling for most of her life with the question of why she survived when so many millions of others were sent to their deaths in the Holocaust.

Full disclosure: Miriam’s sister Susan, born in this country and 15 years younger than she, is a longtime friend of my husband (who also knew Miriam), which is how I came to this book. It was published in 2008.

Safe in America, Miriam never felt secure as a child, too often left alone to cope with her anxieties because both parents worked long hours. Childhood behind her, she married “the first decent man that was willing to gamble on” her.  They were together until his death in 2019. But contemplating her life as homemaker, she wondered “was it for this that I was saved?”

For decades, Miriam struggled mightily with depression, exacerbated by exhaustion from chronic sleeplessness, unable to take pleasure in ordinary things or block out the dark cloud that kept sunshine from her life. She kept wondering,  is it better to remember or is forgetting the key to survival. For decades, the key to her mother’s adjustment was not dwelling in the remembering, which Miriam saw as denial. Miriam herself could not forget, and so, she wrote, the sadness continued unabated. It would take decades for her to learn to use her memories in ways to heal herself and help educate others.

In 1965, at the age of 35, Miriam returned with her mother to Hamburg, Germany, where she had lived as a child.  Thanks to obsessive record-keeping by the Germans, she was able to reconstruct what had befallen her beloved grandparents, but finally knowing did not bring peace. She struggled with the concept of God and what it means to be Jewish. For a long time, she couldn’t bring herself to attend religious services though she remained engaged in Jewish organizations and spent many years writing about her experiences and contributing to Holocaust memory projects.

Clearly Miriam was a survivor, though she herself reserves the term for those who actually survived the camps. But she bore the guilt of having been saved, and for decades it defined her life. She had three children but wrote that, when she had a granddaughter, she found a new kind of love, one that she could lavish on the baby as  she dearly wished to have been loved as a child.

The poems she includes at the end of the memoir have their own soft rhythms, rich language, and honest sentiments. Several essays are crisply laid out. The book ends with a surprise, which I will not spoil for you readers. It has to do with a letter from a Christian friend from her Hamburg days, bringing even more poignancy to Miriam’s memoir.  Miriam Spiegel Raskin died on October 13^th at the age of 95. In Remembering & Forgetting, she leaves behind a legacy of understanding and empathy for all those who were touched, either directly or indirectly, by the world’s most terrible genocide.