I can’t imagine it. I’ve tried, but it’s beyond my ability. The closest I can come to imagining what it must have been like to survive the Holocaust and, against all odds, marry, have children, and live a happy life is knowing what it was like to be the child of an RCAF pilot who spent three months injured in a POW hospital in occupied France. 

I suppose it’s understandable that people can’t imagine living through such trauma themselves. It protects us. But when you’re the child of people who survived that horror, when the knowledge of what one or both of your parents experienced forms the backdrop for your entire life, lived in comfort and safety in one of the richest countries in the world—that’s a different story.

Marsha Lederman, author of the bestselling Kiss the Red Stairs: The Holocaust, Once Removed (McLelland &Stewart, 2022), which I devoured last year, was one of those children. Bonny Reichert (class of 2022, Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction, University of King’s College) was another.

For most of her life, Richert coped with the knowledge of what had happened to her father by not thinking about it. I don’t blame her. She and her father talked about one day writing a book together about it, but for one reason and another that day never came. Until one day, after a trip to her father’s native Poland and an encounter with the perfect bowl of borscht, Reichert realized the time had come. 

The result of that realization is How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty (Appetite by Random House, 2025). A memoir with strong culinary overtones, How to Share an Egg shares with the reader that good food has played an important role in the author’s life, not only because, as the daughter of a successful restaurateur, she grew up with excellent cooking but because her father had very nearly starved to death. 

The preface to the book opens like this:

Imagine two boys—a couple of skeletons, really—roaming the German countryside. One is fourteen, the other, a little older. It’s the spring of 1945, and they haven’t eaten much besides potato peels and coffee grounds for three years. They knock on door after door until they find a farmer who goes into his kitchen and brings something back: a single brown egg. One egg for two starving boys. … 

The book you’re about to read is a tale of hunger and sorrow and love. It’s a mishmash of what happened to my dad and what’s happened to me; a portrait of a parent and a child, a father and a daughter. It’s both a small story and an enormous one, a study of contrasts. And because it’s my family, it’s a story about food—sumptuous meals and meals of almost nothing at all; food that is simple and complicated, basic and bountiful. Food that is rife with meaning.

How does a daughter reconcile her privilege when her father had nothing? How does she set her table, heavy with plenty, when her ancestors were lucky to share a single egg? As much about survival as sustenance, the story you’re about to read is about a family that lost everything and built itself up again, one meal at a time. 

I sometimes worry that recent generations simply don’t know enough about the Holocaust. I worry about the way this lack of knowledge has been fuelling a global resurgence in antisemitism. I’m heartened by the appearance of books by the children of survivors, like Reichert. If there was ever a book to teach about that shameful period in human history while making you go from laughing to crying and back again, this is surely it. 

Books about the Holocaust:

Wanda’s War: An Untold Story of Nazi Europe, Forced Labour, and a Canadian Immigration Scandal, by Marsha Faubert. Review coming soon.

One in Six Million: The Baby by the Roadside and the Man Who Retraced a Holocaust Survivor’s Lost Identity, by Amy Fish. Review coming soon.