hana dubova

On the final episode of this first season of The Memory Generation, host Rachael Cerrotti is joined by her cousin Elana Israel to talk about their grandmother, Hana Dubova. Hana was the matriarch of their family. She was a joyful, fun, spirited grandmother who also was the sole Holocaust survivor in their family. Rachael spent more than a decade researching and retracing Hana's survival story and turned it into an award-winning documentary podcast and a book. This is the first public conversation she has had with any extended family member about this work. (This project is titled We Share The Same Sky. Learn more at: www.sharethesamesky.com). 

Elana is a psychologist and a relationship coach and lives outside of Philadelphia with her son. In this conversation, Elana shares her experience living with Hana in the final months of her life and struggling with addiction in the years after. Rachael and Elana dig into their process making amends when Elana became sober and how addiction affects grief. They also share memories and reflections about Hana and what it felt like to have a grandmother who carried such a heavy life experience.

Elana and Rachael recorded this conversation on October 29, 2022. Elana was at home near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Rachael was in Portland, Maine.

Rachael Cerrotti sits down in Los Angeles with oral historian Stephen D. Smith who co-created The Memory Generation for a conversation about testimony and the retelling of war-torn memories. For 12 years, Stephen served as the Finci-Viterbi Executive Director of USC Shoah Foundation, the archive founded by Steven Spielberg to document the Holocaust and genocide. He recently left  that role to be the Executive Chairman and co-founder of StoryFile, the world’s first AI conversational video platform that brings video alive. In addition, Stephen founded the UK Holocaust Centre in England, cofounded the Aegis Trust for the prevention of crimes against humanity and genocide and was the project director responsible for the creation of the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda. He is a theologian by training, has authored several books, produced several documentary films and was the inaugural UNESCO Chair on Genocide Education.

Rachael & Stephen recorded this conversation for The Memory Generation on February 24, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. 

For more: www.memorygenerationpodcast.com/stephen-smith

"There were really two plans. One, was to become something -- somebody. Two, was to go back and see who was left."

"I was a citizen of nothing." 

I always think how different it is, what is in your head and what is in your reality.

“She’s 16. She should be in school. She should be with her family. Her letters shouldn’t be censored. Sentences shouldn’t be blacked out. Envelopes shouldn’t be stamped with a swastika. But I guess you can get used to anything.”

The bridge always burned or was destroyed. There was no way to go back again. Once you made another step, you couldn't step back.

In the years after her death, I uncovered an incredible archive of her life. She’d left behind boxes upon boxes of letters and photographs and diaries. There were preserved albums dating back to the 1920s and letters she’d sent to lovers. There were report cards and deportation papers and love notes from her parents censored by Nazis. Then, amidst all of these papers, I found a plain manila folder. It had a note on it, written in red ink in her shaky cursive handwriting. She’d written my name.