--- title: Last Words date: 2021-10-19T05:30:00-04:00 author: University of Maryland canonical_url: "https://today.umd.edu/last-words" section: Articles --- # Last Words *October 19, 2021* — by [Sala Levin ’10](/author/sala-levin-10) > For Two Decades, Professor Leads Writing Workshop for Holocaust Survivors *Holocaustmemoryproject 1920x1080 — In the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s bimonthly “Echoes of Memory” program, Margaret Polizos Peterson Ph.D. ’14, assistant clinical professor in the College of Education, helps survivors put their memories on paper for their families and the greater public.* **IN 1964,** Peter Gorog and a few friends hitchhiked from the southern border of their native Hungary some 800 miles north to the Baltic Sea. Along the way, they passed through Warsaw, where a monument commemorated the 1943 ghetto uprising. Gorog wanted to stop there. It was the closest thing he could imagine to a gravesite for his father. Born in Budapest in 1941, Gorog was the son of Olga, a hatmaker, and Arpad, an office manager. “It wasn’t a good place to be born in a Jewish family,” says Gorog. During Olga’s pregnancy, Arpad was conscripted into forced labor, and was allowed to meet his son only for a short time three months after his birth. In 1942, Arpad was sent to Ukraine. The Hungarian Ministry of Defense declared him dead in January 1943. Twenty-one years later, Gorog sneaked out early one morning in Warsaw to stand before the 36-foot stone wall depicting the leaders of the uprising emerging in bronze. There, free from the state-mandated forgetting imposed by formerly German-allied Hungary, he felt a connection to the man he never knew. “That was the first time I related to the Holocaust and to what happened to the Jewish people and personally to my father.” Yet even after he defected from socialist Hungary to the United States in 1980 and began talking about his wartime experiences—from living in a protected apartment purchased by Swedish architect and humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg to being liberated from the Budapest ghetto in 1945—his memories of that morning in Warsaw remained buried. What shook them loose decades later was a prompt handed out in a writing workshop run by a University of Maryland faculty member. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s bimonthly “[Echoes of Memory](https://www.ushmm.org/remember/holocaust-reflections-testimonies/echoes-of-memory)” program for survivors who volunteer, now marking its 20th year, is many things to many people: a community where those who lived through the Holocaust can connect with others, a space to make meaning of their experiences, and—a writer’s perpetual frenemy—a deadline. Margaret Polizos Peterson Ph.D. ’14, assistant clinical professor in the College of Education and workshop leader since its start, recalls that in the beginning, most participants were older survivors who had endured ghettos and concentration camps and were determined to ensure that history was written by those who had lived it. Facts, dates, names, who was lost from the family—that’s what they focused on. Now, as the number of those survivors continues to dwindle and members of a younger generation who were children during the war assume prominence, the urgency of preserving their memories remains, but a more nuanced understanding of their task has emerged: one that recognizes that remembering a traumatic life event is a necessarily subjective project. “One of the survivors said this great thing which sticks in my mind,” says Peterson. “She said, ‘I don’t write a fact, ever.’ What she meant was, ‘I’m telling my story. I’m telling the experience that I lived.’” Many survivors still feel the desire to solidify history in writing, says Peterson. But many also feel a more personal mission to tell their grandchildren and great-grandchildren that they were there, and how that felt. --- *Peter Gorog and his mother, Olga, posed for a portrait in post-World War II Hungary; today a U.S. citizen/resident, Gorog (far left) reflects on his father’s death in the Holocast for a remembrance project.* --- *two sisters hold baby* *Al Munzer’s family gathered for a meal before being torn apart by war* --- *Susan Warsinger, of Bad Kreuznach, Germany, helped her mother, Annie Hilsenrath (left), push her baby brother, Joseph, before the war.* --- *Halina Peabody’s family surrounded her baby carriage for a photo* *Halina Peabody played as a child before the war before escaping with her parents and sister.* *Peter Gorog’s father, Arpad, declared dead in Ukraine in 1943, looks at the son who would retain no memory of him.* **Sidebar note:** “Perhaps imagination is the purview of the young and like other more tangible faculties diminishes as we get older. I cannot pinpoint the time when the undeniable reality of the death of my sisters extinguished the last glimmer of hope of seeing them alive. But for the past 20 years I have been lighting memorial candles on the Hebrew date corresponding to February 11, 1944. … On rare occasions, I have allowed myself to believe in an afterlife, a time when I might finally embrace my dad and my sisters. But like my mother, I am too anchored in reality to allow such musings for long.”*—Al Munzer* --- **Sidebar note:** “As far back as I can remember, every time I was in a difficult situation, in physical pain or emotional distress, in seemingly hopeless situations, I conjured up an image. It was an image I had never seen, but it was more real than anything you can imagine implemented in a high-definition, 3-D movie. In this scene, I see my father walking in knee-high snow in the endless Ukrainian steppe, in his worn-out civilian shoes, wearing clothes that were not meant for the brutal Russian winter, hungry and fearful that he would be shot if he stopped for a little rest. At that moment, all of my pains dissipate, my hopelessness turns into vision, and my disappointments become negligible. I realize the sad truth—that he never had a chance to pursue his dreams, that he was half my age when he was robbed of the opportunity to see me growing up and to have fun with his grandchildren. This imaginary scene gives me hope and strength when all else fails. In spite of the tragedy that robbed me of a normal childhood and took my father away, I am thankful for the memory of my father’s unfinished life.”*—Peter Gorog* --- **Sidebar note:** This story is featured in the Fall 2021 issue of *Terp* magazine. Find all the stories online at [terp.umd.edu](https://terp.umd.edu/). --- **Sidebar note:** Maryland Hillel has purchased 20 tickets to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. on Sunday for students to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day (Jan. 27). Depart from Hillel at noon, or meet on site at 1 p.m. Visit [marylandhillel.org/events](https://marylandhillel.org/events/) for more information. **Topics:** [People](https://today.umd.edu/tags/people) **Tags:** [Alumni](https://today.umd.edu/topic/alumni), [History](https://today.umd.edu/topic/history) **Units:** [College of Education](https://today.umd.edu/topic/college-education)