As the founder/director of Bridge To Poland (BTP), Leora Tec creates immersive intellectual and cultural travel experiences that examine the history of the Jews in Poland and how non-Jewish Poles today are commemorating that history. Leora is the daughter of Holocaust survivor and Holocaust scholar Nechama Tec.

Leora is currently working on a book about her Polish identity entitled, I’m Not Polish: My Discovery of Identity. She holds a B.A. from Wellesley College and a J.D./LL.M. from Duke University School of Law.

Visit her website at http://bridgetopoland.com/

“The Persistence of Memory: What Happens When All the Survivors Are Gone?” (Tues-106), 12:45-1:30 P.M.

How will we remember the Holocaust when those who lived through it are gone?… How will we hold on to a multiplicity of stories and avoid the stereotypes that can erase the nuances of individual lives? … Who is tasked with remembrance and what does it look like?

Through the lens of her experience as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and scholar, and through her own experiences and connections with Polish scholars and artists who are grappling with this history, Leora Tec teases out the many ways of answering these questions. Through the stories she tells, and a sense of the poetry of fleeting moments, she addresses both the challenges and the unexpected clarity that can come from embracing the details of a human life, and finds ways to uncover hope, even in the fragments of this shattered history.

Topics: Holocaust research, Jewish history and culture, Remembering survivors

Sleepless in Seattle: “Reading ‘Dry Tears’: A Daughter’s Discovery of a Mother’s Lost Childhood” (Weds-164), 10:00-10:25 P.M.

As a child I didn’t know that my mother was a Holocaust survivor. She didn’t talk about her experiences for 30 years. When her memoir of passing as a Christian during the Holocaust, in Nazi-occupied Poland, Dry Tears, came out, I first read it to learn her story. Then I read it again. And each time I got something else out of it.

Join me on the journey of these re-readings about the 8 year old who was not allowed to go to school because she was Jewish, to the 12 year old who had to pretend to be Catholic to keep her family alive, to the 14 year-old who survived the war and had to begin her life afresh. Her story is one of pain, abandonment, courage and resilience. It is a story that brings up questions of identity and guilt and what it means to suffer and survive.