Buried Rivers: A Spiritual Journey into the Holocaust (ePub)

Uplifting 2nd-generation Holocaust memoir explores bonds between the living and the dead, and how the body transmits and receives messages from the past.

To the chagrin of her parents, Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, the author became a Buddhist at 19, nearly tearing her family apart. Decades later, on a German train, she felt the presence of spirits who had died in the Holocaust. Their question, "How can you still believe in basic goodness?" sent her on a series of life-changing journeys to Poland to find the answer. Would her years of Buddhist meditation finally prove helpful to her lineage instead of being a betrayal?

In 2006, the author first travels to Poland, the Holocaust's largest graveyard, and to her mother's city of Lódz, to reconnect with her family's tragic history while exploring basic goodness, not in theory, but in the present moment of her body and heart. With no living elders to consult, she relies on an account dictated by her uncle, an Auschwitz survivor, before his death for clues to the past.

As she retraces her mother's and uncle's steps through Europe, and walks in the places where ancestors lived for centuries, she stumbles into a mysterious stream of love-if only she can receive it. Aware of lingering traumatic imprints, she realizes that helping the dead is inseparable from healing her own wounds; and that opening to events previously hidden, and darkness itself, brings a transformation that widens our perception and changes us forever.

Beyond recovering a lost family history, this riveting narrative reveals connections between spirituality and trauma, Judaism and Buddhism; and intimately explores family loyalty, religious boundaries, and the invisible blessings of ancestors.

Approx. length: 92,000 words