Esther V. Levy

"Legacies, Lies and Lullabies--The World of a Second Generation Holocaust Survivor" is my first book and a true labor of love. After my mother passed away in May 2006, my grandparents already deceased, I was driven to write my memoir and family history, this story which has been in me all my life seeking passionate expression, and to share with the world, in addition to other family testimonies, a unique account of a Second Generation survivor of the Nazi concentration camp Theresienstadt (also known as Terezin)in Bohemia. This memoir is softened with humor, recipes, poems, songs, the psychological impact upon the first and second generations, cultural tidbits and is fleshed out with ample history and viewpoints.

I always felt special because my mother was one of the 100 or so child survivors of the 15,000 children who passed through Terezin.

I am an accomplished classic painter of oils and pastels, but I always loved to write--as long as my teachers weren't giving me an anxiety attack forcing me to write a composition on demand.

I am a poet, always a creative soul, reading and writing incessantly from the time I learned how, drawing and painting from the time my mother gave me my first wooden easel at age 3, and I started paying close attention to my grandmother's Holocaust stories from a tender age. I was closer to my mother and maternal grandparents than my brother or sister, and it was natural for me to become the family historian, mesmerized by the spectre of the Holocaust hanging over the heads of my immediate and extended family.

I always felt different from Jewish American girls and American girls in general because of my Eastern European upbringing, though we were not very religious. Growing up with European parents and other greenhorn relatives, I felt privileged to have lived with my grandparents (having two mothers, really)in my first 11 years in Riverdale, NY.

I have traveled to Prague and to Terezin twice, putting together my legacy and validating my feelings of belonging to a vanished world, so that I could paint--with words--the story of my family's dark history.