Would you have shocked to know that your mother had survived the Holocaust during the World WarII?..or Had you been the mother, would you have hidden the experiences from your son?

Yishay Garbasz, an Israeli photographer, discovered at 18 that his mother had been born in Berlin, Germany. He realised then that his mother survived the Holocaust from the WWII. The news shocked him deeply how his mother has hidden this from him for so long. Yet, the family still could not talk openly about the Holocaust.

To understand what his mother had been through, Yishay decided to produced a project, "My Mother's Footsteps" by taking pictures of the places she went during the Holocaust.

My Mother's Footsteps Exhibition

Visitors to the exhibition would have to follow small rocks arranged as a walking path of the mother. The show begins with this sentence.

'The mother' did not really want to reveal her past, but Garbasz's father who was very ill insisted that his mother should write a diary to record her experiences. She wrote it beside his deathbed in 1995. Garbasz, the artist, explains "over 60 years that Holocaust happened to my mother, but its emotional legacy shaped our family in many painful ways." Her record gives voice from a Jewish girl who survived the hard time.

She wrote, "In 1933, with the coming of Hitler to power, my parents fled to Holland with me and my two sisters, Fanny and Minnar."

"We went to live in a town named Groningen, in the north-east of Holland. We were quite poor, as we had left most of our possessions in Germany. We rented a flat in a Jewish neighbourhood, close to the two synagogues. Our home was very religious", said the mother.

A bread shop near the neighbourhood the family lived then.

She went on to describe "We, the Jewish people, had to wear a yellow Star of David and the letter "J" on our clothes. We were forbidden to use public transportation and couldn't attend our regular school anymore, only Jewish school. Each day fewer children came. During the night, they and their families had been sent to Westerbrook. It was the main concentration camp in Holland and from there people were sent to East, mainly to Auschwitz, Sobibor, Bergen-Belsen, Revensbrook adn Theresienstadt. Every week a transport left Waterbrook with 1,000 people or more. All in all, more than 100,000 people (out of a pre-war Jewish population of 140,000 or so) were sent away. Only around 3,000 returned after the war. Holland lost 80 per cent of its Jewish people, only slightly less than the loss in Poland".

Her father was taken to a concentration camp first, while her mother and three daughters left to survive alone. Later, they were taken to another concentration camp. The mother worked in a kitchen, two sisters worked outdoor while the 'mother', the narrator, 4 at that time, was a messenger girl in the camp. She was ordered to run back and forth the whole day until her shoes were broken.

Later the whole family was sent to Theresienstadt ghetto, and the father saw this Hebrew sentence written on a synagogue's wall. "Please remove us from thy wrath and take pity on the people thou hast chosen".

"We passed something that looked like a big room with many showerheads in the ceiling. We were told not to undress as there was no water. We didn't know that this was the gas chamber", said the 'mother'.

There were no proper toilets in the concentration camp. Men and women needed to use the same place as a toilet.

"Because there was no paper, people had to wipe themselves with their hands".

"toilet" in the concentration camp.

The second part of "My Mother's Footsteps" will be continued the next time.