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Innocent Words, Deadly Meanings: How Language Enabled the Holocaust
“Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, yet they accumulate their poison over time.”[1] In the early 1930s, Victor Klemperer noticed a change in how words were being used in Germany. Klemperer was a professor of linguistics at the...
The Memories Of Holocaust Survivors are Being Shared in a Place Where Few Holocaust Survivors Remain
In Arkansas, where Holocaust survivors are rare, eight young adults have become keepers and tellers of survivors’ stories. “I promise to keep your memory and tell your story.” One by one, eight storytellers stand in front of a Holocaust survivor and make this promise. [redirects to L’Chaim Magazine]
Candle and Chronicle Newsletter December 2025
Happy Hannukah! A year ago, we added Jenna Price to our team to run our Storyteller Bureau. Jenna helps the storytellers find venues to tell their stories to the community. In the last year, she more than doubled the number of programs we offered. [Redirects to Mailchimp]
Innocent Words, Deadly Meanings: How Language Enabled the Holocaust
“Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, yet they accumulate their poison over time.”[1] In the early 1930s, Victor Klemperer noticed a change in how words were being used in Germany. Klemperer was a professor of linguistics at the...
The Memories Of Holocaust Survivors are Being Shared in a Place Where Few Holocaust Survivors Remain
In Arkansas, where Holocaust survivors are rare, eight young adults have become keepers and tellers of survivors’ stories. “I promise to keep your memory and tell your story.” One by one, eight storytellers stand in front of a Holocaust survivor and make this promise. [redirects to L’Chaim Magazine]
Candle and Chronicle Newsletter December 2025
Happy Hannukah! A year ago, we added Jenna Price to our team to run our Storyteller Bureau. Jenna helps the storytellers find venues to tell their stories to the community. In the last year, she more than doubled the number of programs we offered. [Redirects to Mailchimp]
Candle & Chronicle March 2026 Dispatch
There are times when the work is visible—when a teller stands before an audience and a story is carried aloud. And there are times when the work happens more quietly. February held both. We gathered for an Echoes of the Past program, Saving Our Souls, examining acts...
Learning to Tell by Listening
When I was very young, I learned that if I sat quietly, I could listen undisturbed to my mother and aunts telling stories from their childhoods. As I heard names I recognized and places I had seen, I sat fascinated at the revelations. People I knew as sweet old ladies...
Navigating the role of bystander: What can we do?
I am beginning to sympathize with the people of the 1930s – the people we describe as indifferent bystanders. I am also beginning to recognize that their stories are much too complicated for us to use the word indifferent. [Redirects to the Times of Israel]
Talking with my Father; Talking for my Father
On a trip to visit my father and stepmother in 1976, I brought a cassette recorder and half a dozen blank cassettes with the intention of interviewing Dad. The first evening after dinner I brought it down to where Dad was sitting, reading the Yiddish edition of...
Never Forget
I remember reading The Diary of Anne Frank as a tween and being drawn to her positivity and hopefulness despite the constant fear of discovery. Later, in college, I read Dr. Victor Frankl’s memoir Man’s Search for Meaning for a psychology class. That book, with its...
Candle & Chronicle Newsletter February 2026
When storyteller Cathy Polakoff shared the story of Olympic swimmer Eva Szekely with a high school class recently, a student commented that she had always known the Holocaust was “a bad thing,” but only when she heard it through a storyteller’s voice did she truly feel its enormity. [Redirects to Mailchimp]
Memories and Stories That Continue
Growing up in Czechoslovakia (now Slovakia), I was always mesmerized by a black and white portrait in my maternal grandparents’ bedroom. It showed a gorgeous young woman with her head tilted slightly toward her shoulder, her subtle smile brightening her face. This was...
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