Can you talk a little bit about why you made the decision to pull everything together into a volume?

Yeah, you know, I'm just going to go back to your question about the term collision, because it occurred to me as you asked this latest question, how that moment was a real collision for me.

And I write about this in the book.

It was a collision between 2023 contemporary me and the little girl me who was still afraid of the Nazis showing up at my door, which is something that I have lived with my whole life, this sort of irrational fear that the knock at the door is coming for me and my family as it did for my mother and father and their families, which of course are my family.

So there was a real collision there between my worst fears and something that was actually happening in the news.

So that's another way that the word collision, I think, is relevant in this discussion.

Weirdly, when it happened, October 7th, 2023, my first thought, not my first thought, but one of my first thoughts was, can I write about this? Am I allowed to write about this or am I too close to it as a Jewish person, as someone who has close family in israel as someone who has spent time in israel um will it be am i too biased to approach the subject so i wasn't even sure if i should write about it initially And I reached out to my editors that weekend.

Where did you find comfort? Where have you found comfort in this moment as someone who is not only processing and translating this experience for a readership, but someone who is living through it herself?

Tucked away in a room on the University of Toronto campus in front of a camera connected to Zoom, Jeanette Goldman and Marcia Lederman tell their stories.

For me, the Holocaust is not just a history lesson.

It is my family story.

It is not just history.

It lives in me, in my blood and my bones, and quite literally in my genes.

We call this intergenerational trauma.

I don't know if you believe in miracles, and I'm not sure if I believe in miracles, but the world could really use one right now.

Here's Marsha Lederman.