Join us for the first event in the Montreal Holocaust Museum’s new programming series about the second and third generations, the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors: On September 9th, attend an in-person discussion at the Museum with Ilanit-Michele Woods, the creator of the podcast Olga, Erika, and Me, and her mother, Erika Eriksson. Ilanit-Michele Woods grew up in Montreal and currently lives in England, but working on this podcast allowed her to reconnect with her family ties to the city, where her mom still lives.
The event will be moderated by Sarah Deshaies, researcher on CBC’s Daybreak. It will be a moving exploration of the creation of the podcast, their family story of survival, and its intergenerational impact.
Tickets are $5 and reservations are required.
This event is being run in partnership with The Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) and Cummings Centre.
ABOUT THE PODCAST
Ilanit-Michele had been born and raised in the Jewish faith. But like her own mother Erika, she felt her faith had been force-fed to her by her grandmother, Olga. As a young adult, Ilanit-Michele chose to minimise the Jewish aspects of her identity, and find her own path.
Then Olga’s memoir resurfaced in a box after her death, its first page specifically dedicated to her daughter and granddaughter. It told a tale of growing up in 1930s Hungary, surviving years in Auschwitz and other camps, and discovering at the war’s end that her family had been almost completely obliterated. Olga had never revealed the full story to anyone during her lifetime, and the manuscript had lain in its box for over twenty years.
Moved by the discovery, Ilanit-Michele and her mother began absorbing the story. They had it translated from Hungarian by Eszter Andor, Oral History and Remembrance Coordinator at the Montreal Holocaust Museum. They went to visit the locations it mentioned and recorded the impact it had on their own views of family, history, faith and identity. Through travel, dialogue, interviews and reading out excerpts of Olga’s story, the lives of these three generations of women were rebraided, the tapestry of the family repaired, and its Jewish heritage reconsidered.