Thread by @HoarseWisperer

I grew up in a New York City apartment in a neighborhood filled with old first-generation immigrants from Western Europe.

There was a storage room in the basement the super would occasionally let us into.

It was just filled with old steamer trunks.

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Most had been abandoned by tenants who had long since left or died.

They were beautiful inside. They were designed to be stood up on their end. Many were velvet-lined with drawers on one side and room to hang clothes on the other.

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The super gave my mother two of them. She still has them.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized those trunks were the only luggage of European Jews fleeing the Holocaust.

At one time, those trunks held the only possessions they escaped with.

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As a kid, that room in the basement always seemed like your grandparents attic. Filled with forgotten treasures and interesting things.

Now, as an adult, I understand it as something different. Something more solemn. A room full of history and struggle and survival.

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Now, it seems like another of the small tragedies of stolen lives and memories and family histories that those trunks were left behind.

There was an entire roomful of them. Each a life saved. Each a life uprooted. Both loss and life all at once.

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If only there was a way to reunite them with the original owners’ family.

They were just trunks when I was a kid.

They feel like someone else’s precious heirlooms as an adult.

#HolocaustMemorialDay