transgenerational traces

Even though I didn’t go through the Holocaust, my family did (great-grandparents and grandparents). Perhaps that’s why when I hear someone speaking in German, I get goosebumps, and I can’t bear to see anything related to those times. One of the last stories we know about my family there is that they were seen walking towards another village in the former Romania, and that’s it; they disappeared. My family here found out because they stopped receiving letters, and then they had a hunch that something had happened there. Here, they had to keep working to move forward; there was no space or time to process anything. The deceased who were not buried, nor had a mental space or time for the family to cope with those absences. I am convinced that these violent traces of extinction are passed down from generation to generation. This is a small tribute that I am beginning to pay, to try to process those mourning experiences that couldn’t be talked about. The moment was so overwhelming that it probably took a couple of generations to find the words for that silence. In my case, I’m trying to find the words and process it artistically through old photographs.