• Age: 15
• Grade: 10

This Holocaust memoir crosses generations. In I Have My Mother's Eyes, Barbara Ruth Bluman chronicles her mother's dramatic journey from Nazi-occupied Poland to western British Columbia, where her legacy lives on. Bluman sets an urgent and intimate tone as she follows Zosia Hoffenberg from her genteel upbringing in Warsaw through the shock of the blitzkrieg and on to her escape from Europe through Lithuania, the Soviet Union and Japan. That escape required the help of Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese consul in Lithuania, who defied his superiors and helped several thousand Jews to flee. Bluman also reveals how, even as she was recording her mother's tale of survival, cancer was ravaging her own body. In this interwoven narrative, Bluman explains how she garnered strength from her mother's account as a refugee, "staring death in the face." These twin narratives blossom out of salvaged journal entries and letters, and from the photographs of family members who have reunited after years of displacement. Bluman's daughter Danielle Low brings this double memoir to a conclusion. A celebration of the universal struggle for survival, I Have My Mother's Eyes offers a hopeful response to one of history's darkest times.

Barbara Ruth Bluman (pictured right) was a respected Vancouver lawyer and one of B.C.'s first female arbitrators. She was driven to community activism by her parents' survival of the Holocaust. Her deep commitment to Holocaust understanding and her passion for writing inspired her to write the story of her mother's Holocaust journey from Warsaw to Vancouver. In the middle of the project, Bluman was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and died in 2001. Her daughter, Danielle, completed the story after her death.

Barbara Ruth Bluman's profile page

I Have My Mother’s Eyes: A Holocaust Memoir Across Generations