Memoirist Patricia Bischof pieced together parents’ Holocaust past

Patricia C. Bischof, as an adult, sat in a room in her mother’s house, crying, as she listened to the story of her mother’s life — a story she had never heard before.

Her mother, Ruth, was being filmed in the next room in an interview, which Bischof had set up, for the Shoah Foundation.

Bischof has spent her life trying to piece together her parents’ past and has spent 10 years writing a book about the experience.

“This interview, I now understand, was a way for her to accomplish her healing is a safe environment and to let people know what the Nazis had done to demolish and totally change her life; it took away her life as she knew it,” Bischof writes in her memoir.

When Steven Spielberg was filming “Schindler’s List,” he heard stories from Holocaust survivors and decided they should be recorded. The Shoah Foundation has recorded the stories of genocide survivors from arond the world.

Neither of Bischof’s parents — her father was a concentration camp survivor — would talk about what had happened to them before coming to the United States.

Bischof’s mother was born in 1910 in the Prussian Empire and became Polish in 1918. Bischof, in her book, describes her mother as a tall, beautiful woman with olive skin and dark hair who spoke a half-dozen languages and sang with a lovely soprano voice.

As a mother, she was strict and made clothes for her daughter that did not show her shape. The family listened to opera on Sundays and the four children — Patricia was the oldest — weren’t allowed to listen to rock and roll.

“Sometimes I just felt lost,” says Bischof in this week’s Enterprise podcast. She didn’t fit in with her classmates at school. “I couldn’t relate. Sometimes even today I can’t even relate, if you really want to know.”

Bischof writes in the introduction to her memoir, “We all need connections to our past.”

Read the full story: https://altamontenterprise.com/03132022/memoirist-bischof-pieced-together-her-parents-past-and-found-her-voice

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