Kenneth D. Wald

After a long career in academia, Kenneth D. Wald shifted his focus to his family’s encounter with the Holocaust. The stories of his German-Jewish ancestors were hidden away for decades because neither parent wanted to make their children afraid. Just as likely, the parents did not want to revisit their history through their own troubled dreams.

Wald stumbled onto his family’s tragic past by accident, discovering a trove of letters written by his grandparents in Germany to his father in the United States.

Reading these letters gave him his first introduction to his grandparents, enabling him to feel the pain of their absences from his life. He found a black and white videotape of his father’s appearance at a panel of Holocaust survivors in 1978 and a similar recording of his mother’s 1992 interview by the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California. These sent him into a deep search for more information in archives and from informants around the world.

The product of these efforts is Ghosts on the Wall: A Grandson’s Holocaust Memoir. Released on November 9, 2024, the anniversary of the Kristallnacht riots that devastated his families’ lives, the book traces how the Holocaust affected three generations of Schönwalds. Despite the passage of time, the author reminds his readers that “We are not done with the Holocaust and it is not finished with us.”