Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorates the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on January 27, 1945. Today, the University Press of Kentucky honors Holocaust Remembrance Day by lifting up the voices of Holocaust survivors in Kentucky.
Released this month, This Is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak presents the accounts of Jewish survivors who resettled outside of the usual major metropolitan areas. Using excerpts from oral history interviews and documentary portrait photography, author Arwen Donahue and photographer Rebecca Gayle Howell tell the fascinating stories of nine of these survivors in a unique work of history and contemporary art. The book focuses on the survivors’ lives after their liberation from Nazi concentration camps, illuminating their reasons for settling in Kentucky, their initial reactions to American culture, and their reflections on integrating into rural American life.
Praise for This Is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak
“Until Donahue and Howell turned their recorders and cameras on these well-chosen survivors living in Kentucky, no one had taken the time to ask how these solitary transplants made new lives for themselves and their children in rural middle America. The stories and images reproduced in this book are both moving and arresting. We owe Donahue and Howell a great debt for rescuing them before they disappeared down the trapdoor of historical memory.” — Lawrence N. Powell, author of Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana
“This Is Home Now focuses on the overlooked stories of Holocaust survivors who relocated to the commonwealth.” —Lexington Herald-Leader
To learn more about the steps you can take to honor Holocaust survivors today and year round, as well as access resources to better understand the historical and cultural repercussions of this tragedy, please visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at ushmm.org.
The University Press of Kentucky 