Last Saturday I drove to the Bronx to meet Esia Shor, a survivor of the Bielski partisan group I wrote about in Escaping Into the Night, and her daughter, Lora. They greeted my husband, son, and me warmly, offering us a large and tasty spread of bagels, muffins, fruit, cheese and avocados. (When Jews get together, there is always food!) Essie showed me some old pictures and told me some stories about her experience as one of the original 25 members of the Bielski partisans.
Essie is a vibrant woman who looks years younger than her age, and I can see in her still the determination to survive and succeed in whatever she sets her mind to. Currently, she is hoping to publish her own account of her experience as a short memoir geared for schoolchildren. She told me, somewhat in jest, that my book made her angry. “Why?” I asked. “Did I get something blatantly wrong?” (every historical fiction writer’s nightmare). “No,” she said. “Because you wrote about Norwogrodek,” she exclaimed. “That’s my town, my story.”
Though she was joking, the remark gives a writer question to pause. How much responsibility do we have in portraying others’ stories? In writing Escaping Into the Night, I had no intention of portraying the life of any specific person, and merely created composite characters whose experiences were based on things I read. I’m sure the upcoming movie about the Bielski Partisans, Defiance, will have similar fictional elements. Yet having the generic story of the Bielski Partisans recounted in fiction, or even in non-fiction as was done by Peter Duffy and Nechama Tec, doesn’t take away from the compunction to tell your own story–to be in charge of conveying your own experience the way you perceived it, and to have that experience validated by readers.
Essie’s story is a moving and compelling recounting of a remarkable 16-year-old’s struggle for survival. As there will be fewer and fewer living Holocaust survivors in the years to come, it is important for us as a society need to take toward validating, preserving and disseminating the writing of people who actually lived the experience, in order that we take steps toward understanding both hatred and resilience, in the hope that future generations can learn some valuable lessons.
Here’s a picture of Essie and me.
