“Memory without responsibility is just nostalgia,” reflects podcast guest Doron Keren, the keeper of his Family’s harrowing Holocaust survival story. “Someone has to make sure that stories like this live and are experienced by future generations.”
Keren, a retired dentist, has determined to do just that, working tirelessly to help shepherd first his mother’s story (The Girl in the Green Sweater, by Krystyna Chiger, co-written with podcast host Daniel Paisner), and now his grandfather’s memoir, (Beneath the Lightless Sky, by Ignacy Chiger), to bookstore shelves.
His grandfather’s gripping, historically significant account, just published by Amsterdam Publishers, revisits Ignacy Chiger’s desperate struggle to evade Nazi persecution in wartime Lvov, Poland, where he hid with his family for 14 months in the city’s underground sewers, with the help of an unlikely hero.
The book stands as a compelling companion piece to Krystyna Chiger’s 2008 international best-seller, the inspiration behind the 2011 film “In Darkness,” from acclaimed Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
Time magazine film critic Richard Corliss called the movie “a thrilling adventure picture—as if Anne Frank had found an Inglourious Basterd to help her make ‘The Great Escape.'”
In his foreword to Beneath the Lightless Sky, Keren calls his grandfather “a real-life superhero”—a description that is well-earned. “[He] outwitted interrogators,” Keren writes, “evaded deportation, engineered the survival of a small underground community, and kept alive the faintest flicker of hope in a place where even light could not enter.”
Join us as Keren shares what it was like to grow up beneath the shadow of the Holocaust, and what it means to keep sharing the stories that give our lives shape and meaning.
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