Holocaust to Healing: Closing the Circle

So many stories to be told and so little time left.  That is the reality as we get further and further away from the Holocaust.  There are so many different stories and experiences that need to be recorded and remembered of survivors of the horrific events in Europe during the war years.  There are still some survivors alive who are sharing their personal involvement and there are children of survivors who are sharing the stories they are discovering of their families connections.  There are now books written from Jewish point of view and German points of view.  Family members who are becoming aware that they had relatives with Nazi attachments.  All of these recounted contributions are important to the history of our collective conscience.

Holocaust to Healing: Closing the Circle written by Kati Preston is one of those narratives.  Preston adds another unusual account of the life of a child who escapes and grows up to triumph over the Nazi plan of persecution of the Jews.  Preston takes the reader back to her childhood, describing the warm loving, secure feelings she had growing up in Nagyvarad, in the Transylvania region fought over by the Russians and encompassed later by Hungary.

Preston started out as the happy, well loved,  pampered child of Gabriella and Ernest Rubin.  Her mother Gabriella had been raised Catholic and her father was Jewish.  Life is happy in their home until the the town is walled in as a Ghetto for the Jews.  Gabriella in a effort to save her husband tries to have him baptized but he is sent on what he believes to a work detail and never returns.  When an employee of Gabriella's reports that she has a Jewish child living in the house, Gabriella send Kati off to hide in a friendly client's barn.

After the Russians liberate Hungary life does not get any easier.  There is not much food to eat and Kati is enrolled in a Catholic school and the family is bullied for being middle class, "Bourgeois".  Her mother remarries another survivor, Ernest Ruder.   The family starts what will the beginning of many moves between may countries.  They travel to Israel, Paris, New York City, Milan, Lisbon, and London.

In this book, Kati Preston will tell her story of the different countries they travel through and live in. She will share her story of the war years and the good years.  Her marriages and her children.  In the end with her husband, Gordon Preston she will end her travels in New Hampshire.  She has had a very varied career, working as a seamstress and clothing designer.  She has lived through the Holocaust, cancer, great love and loss.  For the past thirty years she has run the business her son Dani created called "The Hampstead Players".

Finally,  she has also taken on the task of speaker, telling her story of being a hidden child during World War II.   Preston speaks of the tragedy of the lives lost and the survivor guilt that plagues those who are left behind.   She feels it is very important for her to speak for the dead who cannot speak for themselves.  Preston writes, "If you see evil you have to get involved.  If you do not it is as bad as being an active perpetrator."

This book was published in 2016.  Preston lives in New Hampshire and involved with the Cohen Center for Genocide and Holocaust Studies at Keene State College.  She speaks at schools, theaters, synagogues, churches, libraries, Masonic Lodges, and Rotary clubs.