The Story My Papa Never Stopped Telling

A Holocaust Legacy of Survival and Remembrance

Dear Papa,

Today, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, I find myself reaching for the phone.

Ten years is a long time not to speak. Before that, we talked all the time. We really talked. We shared things I’m not sure many grandfathers share with their granddaughters. And vice versa.

Maybe it was because I was your oldest grandchild. Or because I was named after the woman you loved (my grandmother), the only family you had, besides one sister, after the war.

Everything shifted when I was in college and started asking questions. Questions whose answers had sat silent on your tongue for decades. Had you been afraid to open those floodgates? Afraid to tell the story of how you survived such unspeakable evil? Afraid to put words to the nightmares you carried?

I couldn’t imagine it then. Now I can.

Now I know, because you told me. For years, you told me your stories, and I wrote them down as faithfully as I could. At first, your memories came in fragments, out of order, as if five years of horror were all trying to escape at once.

In the beginning, you didn’t know where to start. Your mind held everything, and each question I asked was a gentle squeeze, releasing just a little more. And then more. Until the stories came steadily, fully, until there was nothing left unsaid. Until, maybe, there was a kind of peace.

It was hard enough to live through those horrors once. You lived them again in telling them to me. We thought your story would just be for the family. We were wrong.

When What Papa Told Me began to travel the world (thanks to the YouTube video of me living in that tiny apartment) and I called you every day with updates, I could hear the smile in your voice. Not because of the numbers of sales, but because of what it meant.

That you had survived for a reason: to tell your story.

People used to ask me, “Wasn’t it hard to live in 90 square feet?”

“Hard?” I always wanted to say. “Hard is five years in eight different labor and concentration camps. Hard is losing your entire family. Hard is hunger that never leaves you. Living in a tiny space? That was nothing.”

As if fated, that tiny space helped carry your story even further. Of the millions who watched the video, many found your book, heard your voice, and learned about your life—reaching places neither of us could have imagined.

Now, nearly a century since the Holocaust began, I hear familiar rumblings. I keep asking, Why do so many hate an entire people for the actions of a few? Should the world hate all Russians because of one man? All Americans because of another?

I wish I could ask you these questions. I wish you were here to talk to. And yet, part of me is relieved you’re not. I can’t imagine what it would be like for you to feel even an echo of what you lived through.

So instead, I am writing you a letter and picturing you somewhere at peace, smiling the way you did, and saying what you always said to me, “Enjoy your life.”

Because somehow, after everything, you did.

Missing you.

Love,

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Felice Cohen is an award-winning author, best known for squeezing big ideas into small spaces—like her 90-square-foot NYC apartment (yes, really). Her books include Half In: A Coming-of-Age Memoir of Forbidden Love, 90 Lessons for Living Large in 90 Square Feet, and What Papa Told Me, with praise from legends like Elie Wiesel and Rita Mae Brown. Her viral YouTube tour has racked up over 25 million views—mostly from people wondering where she kept her shoes. More at felicecohen.com.