When many people hear about the Holocaust, they learn about the stories from Central Europe and the various concentration camps that were in that region. One Wenonah-based author is shining a new light on an event that took place in the Ukraine.
Bryon MacWilliams and Holocaust survivor Laura Oberlender will be at the Mullica Hill Branch Library on June 27 from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. to read “The Girl in the Haystack” and tell Oberlender’s experience during the Holocaust. A short question and answer portion will follow.
MacWilliams said he was approached with Oberlender’s story after a friend who works at the Sara and Sam Schoffer Holocaust Resource Center at Stockton University asked him if he knew of authors who could tell the stories of the survivors.
“He recommended me, and one of Laura’s dreams is to go to schools and tell her stories to students,” MacWilliams said. “She thinks people are forgetting about the Holocaust and it’s only being taught as part of genocide, and that’s only one part of the Holocaust.”
Oberlender, whose original name was Lyubov Khomut, resided in Europe until immigrating to Philadelphia in 1949. In 1941, she and her family were in Tuchin, Ukraine, when Germany’s Sixth Army occupied the town and much of the Soviet Union. Native Ukrainians, MacWilliams said, carried out an ethnic attack against the Jewish citizens.
Oberlender now lives on the Jersey Shore.
Originally, MacWilliams wanted to write it as a memoir, but there were portions of the past Oberlender couldn’t remember, so he “reinvented her voice as a young girl” and used quotes from his interview with her.
As a former post-Soviet Union Russia foreign correspondent, MacWilliams used his experience from living and working in the region to also describe what life was like in the Soviet Union to readers.
“Most of the Jewish people who died didn’t see a concentration camp, most were people who died where they lived at the hands or help of their neighbors,” MacWilliams said. “This wasn’t something that was known that much. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 that allowed for this information to come out.”
Oberlender, he said, was cautious at first on telling the story because she was worried people “might still be looking for her” for one reason or another.
MacWilliams said his book took around four years to publish from interviewing Oberlender, to researching the events that took place in that part of Europe, to getting it accepted by a publisher.
He added various publishers he contacted were not keen on publishing “another Holocaust book” because the topic has been written about multiple times.
“It’s intimidating to tell this story because there are people who think ‘who gets the right to tell a Holocaust story’ and that certain people have a right to tell it,” MacWilliams said. “It’s confidence and peace of mind that I will figure out how to tell it and find the information I need to find.”
As for the educational aspect of the book, he said he wrote it in a way that wouldn’t “interrupt the flow of the story” and would be natural for a reader to pick up and to not teach readers about why everything in the biographical novel occurred.
Throughout the novel, he said he used “literary devices” to help convey Oberlender’s accounts to readers and to relate the story to the readers as best as possible.
“This wasn’t that long ago,” he said. “It was just 70 years ago and here you have anti-Semitism and racial/ethnic hatred in this country. So, the story seems pretty current to me and it was a way to deliver the story of the Holocaust in a way that was updated and it came at a time parents have learned about.”
MacWilliams’ book can be rented at the Mullica Hill and Wenonah libraries. It can be purchased, for $10, by visiting www.ItascaBooks.com.
