The Nazis, along with their willing accomplices, murdered over 90 percent of Lithuania’s Jewish population. Many in my mother’s family, including her grandmother, were among the victims.   
When my great-aunt Etta left for America in the early 1900s, her mother gave Etta several pieces of silverware to take with her. My grandmother, the youngest of seven, also wanted to emigrate but her widowed mother cried that she would be left alone.  So my grandmother stayed, eventually married, and had three children.  In 1941, their lives were forever changed when they were interned in the Kovno Ghetto. 
My grandmother and two of her children miraculously survived the Ghetto and subsequent slave labor camps. Then in 1949, after four years in a displaced persons camp, they immigrated to Cleveland where Etta and two of her brothers had settled decades earlier. 
Etta gave my grandmother one of the serving spoons their mother had given her. Years later, my grandmother passed it on to my mother.  Once I began hosting the family gatherings, my mother gave the spoon to me.  
I use the serving spoon on every occasion, whether at a Passover Seder for 30 or a 4th of July picnic. It is hard to explain why the spoon is so meaningful to me.  Perhaps it is because I am the daughter of Holocaust survivors.  Growing up I was not surrounded by family heirlooms or keepsakes.  But we had the spoon, engraved with my great-grandmother’s initials, and the stories of Jewish life before the darkness.      

– Sherry

Relationship:  Child of im/migrant Child of im/migrant