While I was growing up in my grandparents’ household, I never knew the fullness of my genetic heritage, only that my grandfather had been incarcerated in Dachau in 1938 ‘for political reasons’, and emigrated to Seattle with his young family in 1941 while they still could do so. A DNA test in 2017 opened up a wider world, which included two of my grandfather’s sisters, Olga and Zerline, who stayed behind and were deported only months later. I had only a handful of photos and a packet of handwritten letters in German to decipher and translate to get a sense of who they were. I followed breadcrumbs to sites like Yad Vashem and the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) to discover their fates. The more I learned, the more I realized just how much I didn’t know. My many walks on the trails near our home provided ample opportunity to wonder about their lives, and what their last days were like. It was on these walks that I determined that I needed to allow Olga and Zerline a voice again in times when we see history repeating itself.

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Chaos Theory for Beginners (MoonPath Press, 2023), finalist for the Sally Albiso Prize, and Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press). One of Ronda’s current manuscripts was a finalist with the Charles B. Wheeler Prize, the Word Works Tenth Gate Prize, and Four Way Books Levis Prize, and she is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Winner of the Willow Springs Surrealist Poetry Prize and the Cloud Bank Poetry Prize, Ronda’s journal publications include Greensboro Review, Blackbird, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, Fugue, and NPR News / KUOW’s All Things Considered. She is an MFA graduate of Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.