Published by Amsterdam Publishers. Available internationally as an eBook, paperback or hardcover through online bookshops.
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Photo: Marianne (the author's grandmother), with her son, (the author's father), and his sister, (the author's aunt), in 1931.
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Event in Freiburg: 29. Oktober 2026
18 bis 20 Uhr: Veranstalter: Alumni Freiburg. Wir wollen mit die Autorin über ihr Buch ,The Unspeakable. Breaking My Family’s Silence Surrounding the Holocaust‘ sprechen, das letztes Jahr erschienen ist. Darin zeichnet sie den Teil ihrer Familiengeschichte nach, den sie in jahrelanger Recherche dem Schweigen entrissen hat. Ihr Vater hatte ihr 2004 einen 1935 ausgestellten Pass geschickt und darin sehr knappe Informationen über bis dahin nie erwähnte ermordete Familienmitglieder mitgeteilt. Der Pass gehörte Nicolas Großtante – einer deutschsprachigen tschechischen Jüdin, von deren Existenz sie bis zu diesem Zeitpunkt nichts wusste.
Ort und Raum wird noch mitgeteilt!
Book summary:
When research reveals hushed WWII trauma embedded in a British family with Czech-Jewish ancestry.
Researching family history means stepping into the unknown; I discovered that after a passport issued in 1935 unexpectedly fell into my life in 2004. The passport owner was my grandfather's older sister - but why had I never heard of my great-aunt while I was growing up in England? Her name was Grete Lanzer.
Grete's document marked the start of a research journey into my paternal family's tragic past. The unspoken truth about never-mentioned relatives who were German-speaking Czech Jews the Nazis had murdered slowly emerged. In the book, I blend my first-person experiences while doing the research with the history of World War II. I encountered bewildering, sudden shifts in consciousness and was often overcome by stupefying sadness as I drew lost family members out of history, and they regained their identity.
Compelling, unpublished writings of relatives who survived World War II surfaced and revealed the quiet side of the Holocaust: dispossession, involuntary emigration, identity issues, and suicide. The narrative reveals how intergenerational trauma can evolve through silent Holocaust anguish embedded in a family. It explores reasons for the older generation not speaking about the past with younger family members. The Unspeakable also shows how present generations may discover that they know little of their forebears' background struggles and losses.
The story is chillingly relevant to the present day.
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Pro-democracy / anti-far-right speech at a demonstration in Freiburg on 2 June 2024.