For nearly twenty years, I searched for the right way to share my parents’ story of love and perseverance before, during, and after the Holocaust. I had a wealth of material—my own memories of growing up in a house under the shadow of the camps; photographs I took during my mother’s powrót to Poland and Auschwitz in 1993, and the wrenching stories she shared with me there; and a box of love letters that my parents had written to each other during their separation after the war.
My first imperative was to organize and then work out my relationship to all this material—how to select, how to report, how to disengage, how to cope, and, finally, how to move on. Each new version of the book I attempted provided a step on my way to a deeper sense of clarity, a new place where I could eliminate the unnecessary and find the path that held this story together.
I knew the basics: the anti-Semitism my father experienced when told that he would have to stand in the back of his medical school classroom; the obligatory marriage to the woman who asked her father to pay for her future husband’s education in France; my father’s forced incarceration in the Zawiercie ghetto where he fell deeply in love with another woman, my mother, Frania; their separate transports to Auschwitz and the deaths of my father’s first wife and daughter; the fundamental facts surrounding their reunion after the war; and the powerful effect of a feature in The Saturday Evening Post which finally brought them together permanently in America.
In the end, it was the story told through their letters—told with more accuracy and more depth than I could ever supply—that provided the true essence of the book, giving it shape, substance, and meaning. My parents had learned to love each other across an ocean, and those letters—written in the confines of their hearts—had survived time and distance and revealed an insatiable passion.
My father had lived through the death march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald. He was curled up in a latrine, near death, on April 11, 1945, when an American soldier—the first black man he had ever seen—kicked him to see if he was still alive. He cried out in French and was taken to Paris with the first transport of French survivors.
My mother’s escape from a death march set her on the path to survival that took her to Brussels in June 1945. By September, she began to correspond with her friend, Nadzia, who had come back to Zawiercie after being in a Russian work camp. Nadzia wrote that “your friend Julek Herszfeld is in Paris right now, and he has been asking about you. Because I knew in my soul that you would write one day, I didn't tell him what other people were saying, that ‘She didn't come back yet.’ I am including his address, and I will write to him with your information.”
After the war, mail service was inconsistent and unpredictable—letters might take weeks, if they arrived at all—as people moved frequently and adjusted to their new lives. Once my mother knew that my father had survived, she placed a small ad in a newspaper seeking information on the whereabouts of Julek Herszfeld.
Eight months after his rescue, a friend saw the ad my mother had placed and told my father that someone was looking for him. From that day in January 1946—“I knocked on her door and heard her footsteps in the hallway, and I knew that I would marry her”—until September 1946, they wrote to each other nearly every day and planned their life together. Though my mother’s letters are missing from the first few months, it isn’t hard to read her emotions between the lines of my father’s visceral, searing replies.
My mother had applied for her visa to come to America before they found each other, so when hers arrived in March 1946, she went ahead and made plans to emigrate. They were certain that my father’s visa, applied for the same month she received hers, would be coming soon, so they married on September 21. Nine days later she left for America.
Unbeknownst to them, the real test of their love was about to begin. My father encountered roadblock after roadblock in his attempts to reach America; eventually, his faith in a just and logical emigration system was stretched past its breaking point. After their first year of separation, he insisted that my mother return to Europe. She visited on the six-month visa available to her, but the time passed and they still had no guarantee he would get his immigration papers. After she returned to the United States, an article in The Saturday Evening Post drew attention to their plight. More effective that the government in spurring sentiment, the article finally helped pave the way for their reunion. Fifteen months after my mother’s visit, my father finally landed in New York.
Over the many years and the circuitous paths that Sweet Noise took to come to fruition, the competing narratives in it actually nurtured one another. My perseverance was sustained by three things: the intensity of my parents’ story, my belief in the strength of my photographs, and, finally, the challenge of committing words to permanence. A friend who is a seasoned curator weighed in, and his suggestion that I streamline the material and flip the linear narrative helped me to bring my parents’ remarkable story to life.
In November 2018, I completed a commission to shoot in Africa that coincided with Paris Photo and offered me the opportunity to meet a publisher. With copies of my maquette in hand—and my father’s Paris-era wallet in my pocket—I knew I had nothing to lose. I introduced myself to several publishers and two weeks later, I received a proposal from Damiani to publish Sweet Noise.
