ABSTRACT
This chapter explores re-enactment phototherapy primarily by presenting the book I previously wrote for myself describing my father never having recovered from the loss of his parents and sister in the Holocaust, to the extent that he could not talk about his family of birth, nor want anything of value, which partly included myself. Utilising re-enactment phototherapy, I dressed as my father, grandfather, grandmother, and aunt, based on a photograph of each my father originally brought to England together with an extraordinary amount of his mother’s Czech crystal. Through this photographic exploration, I started to tell in their voice their story as I imagined it, from when my father left Czechoslovakia to the moment of his, and what was becoming my, family’s murder. Already, things were changing. I had never previously called them ‘my grandfather, grandmother, and aunt’, but rather ‘my father’s parents and sister’. Now, with trepidation, and through this re-enactment phototherapy, they were becoming ‘Eduard’, ‘Adele’, and Hilde’.
