Current Day

My grandmother is very proud of our story, and is very proud of “all the steps it took to get here so we could be sitting at this kitchen table together”. As Ashkenazi Jews, there’s a lot of our stories that we don’t get to tell, and won’t ever be able to find information on. My grandmother devoted a lot of time to finding our family’s story, and her wealth of information is priceless. Thanks to her research we have names of rabbis, villages, businesses, synagogues, and people that we had to leave behind to survive. And we have an anthology of stories about what happened after the Yablonsky/Litowsky/Held family got to the United States.

Me and my brother are named after my grandmother’s parents, Mindl and Nathan Litowsky. My full name is “Sophie Mindl Small” and my brother’s is “Nathan Albert Small”. Until this interview, I didn’t actually know we were named for one set of my great grandparents, but it makes me feel really proud. Something small, my great grandparents’ names, survived through the Holocaust, and we are able to continue those stories. Not everyone like Mindl and Nathan were so lucky, and not everyone like myself and my brother are lucky enough to have those legacies to carry on.

My grandmother hopes that “the story isn’t forgotten”, which is why, in part, she agreed to do this interview. As she joked, “someone is going to have to tell it to your kids!”. I hope that she is around to do so, as she’s really an excellent storyteller, but I feel really lucky that if she isn’t, she did the work to collect all the information so I can.