Rosemary Schonfeld’s moving memoir Finding Relly (Vallentine Mitchell, £15) is subtitled My Family, The Holocaust and Me. This is appropriate because not only does she pay tribute to the six million who were murdered in the Holocaust, including members of her father’s family, but she also describes her search for her Aunt Relly.
Along the way, she relates her own journey: struggling with mental health issues as a result of being a second-generation survivor, coming out as a lesbian, and eventually finding personal fulfilment as a musician.
Schonfeld grew up as the daughter of a Czech immigrant in post-war UK and Canada, unaware of her father’s Jewish identity and of what really happened to his absent relatives. In adulthood, she felt compelled to find out whether Relly, who had been married to her father’s brother and survived Auschwitz, was still alive. Her search proved to be a significant turning point in her life. Over a ten-year period from 2000 to Relly’s death in 2010, Rosemary Schonfeld visited her regularly in Sydney, Australia.
Through their conversations, she began to understand not only what happened to her father, grandparents and uncles, but also how being a second-generation Holocaust survivor had such an impact on herself and others like her.
