By Marion Filler
As the only child of Holocaust survivors, Barbara Gilford yearned for the grandmother she never knew. Now in her 70s, Gilford sifted through layers of time and bureaucracy until she discovered the truth, and shares her journey in Heart Songs, A Holocaust Memoir.
Ostrava, in the province of Moravia, Czechoslovakia, was a city near the German and Polish borders and home to the Buchsbaum family. Among them was Gilford’s grandmother, Clara Buchsbaum and her son, John, who was Gilford’s father.
In 1939, the Nazis’ net tightened around the Jews. John escaped the city but Clara did not choose to leave. Aunts and uncles stayed behind and so did cousin Susi, a beautiful little girl who became the imaginary sister Gilford always wished she had.
Some of the most poignant passages in Heart Songs explore Gilford’s longing to see her lost cousin:
In my wishful imagination today, I picture Susi alive and living in London. I first find her in an outdated TIME magazine. An article mentions her as part of a team grappling with a theory of economics. I could not have imagined the sheep farm in the north of Scotland nor the doctorate from the London School of Economics. My cousin Susi is surprised, stunned actually, when I reach her by phone at her London home. Although she remembers that her Uncle Johnny had gone to America, she never knew of my existence.
“I have been waiting many years for someone to come,” she says, with a slight accent I can’t identify. “Almost my entire life.” Her tone carries a sense of wonder as if she only now realizes seven decades have elapsed.
“I’ve been searching for you since I was a little girl,” I answer. “You were my first hero and I wanted you desperately.”
Gilford goes on to describe an imaginary conversation with Susi over lunch at Browns, the London department store:
We meet the next day. In my handbag I carry the article and some photographs. I am not surprised by my casually elegant cousin. She is tall and slim, dressed in cream-colored cashmere pants and a matching turtleneck sweater. Her silvery blonde hair still boasts the curls of her childhood. My cousin looks fifteen years younger than her eighty-five years.
Susi’s story unfolds. Her parents had placed her on the very last Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia, after all, and promised to meet her after the war. When she was eleven, an immensely kind and large family took her in.
“When the war ended, they wanted to adopt me,” she says, hesitating, “but I could not give up my identity, my connection to my family. After a few years, I accepted that they had not survived but I was still of them. They were my everything.”
I open my bag and the envelope of pictures spills onto the white tablecloth. She picks up the pre-war photo of herself at eight years old, smiling merrily. Her fingers touch the studio portrait of three generations, taken several years earlier—Oma Clara, her mother Gretl, and Susi on her Oma’s lap. Our Oma’s lap. Family. Three generations bonded by love. Tears stream from the corners of her eyes. She makes no effort to dry them.
“You see, they did come back, after all. They came back. Just as they promised.”
The Nazi invasion ultimately led to the extermination of approximately 263,000 Czech Jews. Eighty thousand of them were from the provinces of Moravia and Bohemia.
By September 1939, Clara was able to leave Czechoslovakia under a special program to promote Italian tourism. She was moved to Casa Gaudiello, a hotel in San Donato, Italy.
While there, she sent a stream of letters to keep in touch with her family, and although Gilford’s father tried desperately to free her, he was unsuccessful. Clara’s correspondence and occasional photographs from other family members continued for another few years.
By 1943 the letters stopped, and so did hope of ever finding Clara again.
Gilford, a Morristown resident, was a teacher and psychotherapist. She also was dance critic for the New Jersey section of the New York Times from 1979-1991. She never intended to write a book about the loss of her grandmother and family, but fate intervened.
“Suddenly there were documents from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary that were released when the Russian Federation collapsed and I put in an application with the Red Cross. It took about six years to get an answer.”
In September 1996 she learned that Clara had died at Auschwitz. The revelation prompted a visit to the camps in Czechoslovakia and Poland. But even after that wrenching trip, Gilford didn’t envision a book.
Then, in 2014, fate intervened yet again. Gilford found a cache of her grandmother’s letters among her father’s books that had been sitting on her shelf for 20 years.
“Between a world atlas and a book on Jewish history, I discovered a cardboard folder with disintegrating leather straps and corroded buckles. A frayed pink ribbon held it together,” Gilford recounted.
“The folder contained letters that my father’s mother, my grandmother Clara, had written to my father between 1939 and 1941. I knew just enough German to understand they covered some of the missing years in my grandmother’s brave but ultimately tragic story.
“If I believed in destiny, I’d say those letters had waited for me my whole life. They came to me as I stood on the cusp of retiring as a psychotherapist. They had waited until I was old enough to appreciate them. As I held the packet, I felt a personal and historical imperative to write my Oma Clara’s story of those missing years.”
Once the letters were translated, Gilford knew she had to write a book.
Gilford returned to Poland in 2017 and traveled to Italy in 2018 to thank the Gaudiello family, owners of the Casa Gaudiello Hotel, where Clara spent her last years in comfort and safety.
“I want to have my family’s story take its place in the pantheon of Holocaust stories and to memorialize them,” said Gilford. “They lived, they mattered, and they will be remembered forever because there’s no gravestone to mark where they died. There’s nothing but ash.”
The book took about four years to write, with the assistance of translator Kirsten White and editor Lorraine Ash. It is available on Amazon for $14.99.
Gilford and White will conduct a Zoom discussion at 4 pm Thursday, Oct. 1, 2020, through the Drew University Center for Genocide/Holocaust Studies. Register here.
