Author Archives: jmarmorstein

Elmer Marmorstein is the younger son of Lajos and Ibolya Marmorstein. Born in Középlak in 1930, Elmer grew up first in the peaceful 1930s and then in the tumultuous 1940s.  The family was well-off and relatively assimilated.  He was thirteen when Hungarian Jews were taken from their homes, held in ghettos, and deported to Auschwitz. Continue reading “Elmer’s Video Testimonial”

By the time the traumatic memories get to the second and third generations, they’re literally impossible to remember and paradoxically impossible to forget.  Burdens too great for parents to bear are unconsciously passed to the children, who are haunted by the memories that were never theirs.  This has been what generations of Boss’s and Marmorstein’sContinue reading “Conclusions: Death Toll”

“Karl’s Story, or, They Went to America” What about Karl?  The warm, charming man I remember isn’t in any of the family photos from before the War.  He married Irmgard in 1948, three years after it ended.  While the Boss family was in Memmingen, Karl’s Lierheimer family was about twenty miles away in Kempten.  HisContinue reading “My Jewish Father Meets the Nazis”

I. April 20th, 2020 — It’s day 35 of Philadelphia’s Covid-19 Stay-at-Home order.  It’s also erev Yom-HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day).  Stuck at home, with past and future historical catastrophes on my mind, I find myself returning to a research project about my family history that I had put aside at the beginning of the pandemic. Continue reading “A Short Introduction”