ABSTRACT
The last time my mother Boruska (Barbara Blau) saw her mother (Ilona Blau) was on November 4, 1938, in Michalovce, Czechoslovakia. I, my parents’ only child, am named Elaine after my grandmother, Ilona. My mother, the oldest of eight children, reluctantly boarded a train toward an unknown and unwanted destination, America. She was 22 at the time. My mother separated from her mother and father, watching her mother holding her hand over her heart (something I have done all of my life). She never saw her mother, father, or seven younger brothers and sisters ever again. Ilona and Adolph (her father, my unknown grandfather), Helen Fucho Blau, Anna Blauova Blau, Sarolta Markovits, Zoltan Blau, Ruzena Blau, and Moritz Blau all perished in concentration camps. Ilona died in Buchenwald.
