Saving What Remains: A Holocaust Survivor's Journey Home to Reclaim Her Ancestry

Saving What Remains: A Holocaust Survivor's Journey Home to Reclaim Her Ancestry by Bitton-Jackson, Livia. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9781599215464.

When Livia Bitton-Jackson returned in 1980 to her childhood town of Šamorín, Czechoslovakia, on the Danube River, she was no ordinary tourist: thirty-six years earlier, as a thirteen-year-old girl in what was then the Hungarian town of Somorja, she and her family had been deported to Auschwitz. In Saving What Remains, a best-selling memoirist tells a moving and beautifully written story about disinterring the past so that it will never be forgotten. Bitton-Jackson’s grippingly present-tense account traces her return to the land she and her Jewish community loved when she was a child, a land that now—decades after the Holocaust’s devastation—contained only the remains of a once thriving Jewish culture. What remained in Šamorín was a Jewish cemetery where the bodies of Livia’s grandparents rested. And yet a new dam on the Danube would soon flood the graveyard, permanently obliterating the last traces of her family’s long sojourn in Europe. At her elderly mother’s request, Livia and her husband left from Israel on a precarious quest—to exhume the family remains and bring them to Israel for reburial. The trip brought back memories both joyful and horrifying for Livia. Written in the tradition of the Jewish Book Award finalist Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust, Livia Bitton-Jackson’s Saving What Remains is a heart-wrenching story of a Holocaust survivor’s return to her childhood home decades after surviving Auschwitz. It explores how traces of the Holocaust dot both the landscape and the population despite the utter annihilation of Jewish culture in so much of Europe—while also serving as a poignant and powerful reminder of the debts adult children owe their ancestors.