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This 16-year-old turned her grandmother’s Holocaust survival story into a novel
(New York Jewish Week) — In May of 1937, 7-year-old Inge Eisinger lived in a luxurious Vienna apartment with a pantry stocked with favorite foods and a staff to keep her company. Though she had a strained relationship with her mother and an absent father, Inge, who was mostly raised by her maternal grandmother Anna, was living a charmed life.
This is the scene that opens “Running for Shelter,” a young adult novel about the Holocaust written by a young adult herself: 16-year-old Suzette Sheft, who is a junior at the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. In the novel, Sheft retells her grandmother’s story of surviving the Holocaust.
Published by Amsterdam Publishers, which specializes in Holocaust memoirs, the book is a delicate and powerful reminder of the importance of recording one’s family history. It’s a lesson Sheft learned too early in life: Her father died of pancreatic cancer when Sheft was just 13 and she soon realized she was forgetting all the stories he told her about his childhood.
“I fantasized about rewinding time, so I could go back and record my favorite stories about his childhood,” Sheft writes in an author’s note. “I wished I had taken the time to write these stories down when I had the chance, because his death allowed me to understand the vitality of preserving the stories of our loved ones before it is too late.”
In memory of her father, Sheft recorded the story of his mother, her grandmother Monique Sheft, who was once the Viennese school girl Inge Eisinger.
In pre-war Austria, Eisinger had been living a completely assimilated life — so much so that her parents never even told her that she was Jewish. Following the Nazi takeover of Austria, her mother managed to whisk the two of them away to Switzerland, then Paris, but soon abandoned her. After a twisting and tragic story, Eisinger eventually reunited with her grandmother and moved to a village in Central France to wait out the war, changing her name to the more French “Monique.”
Sheft’s novel ends in 1946, when the two are on the boat to New York after the war and Eisinger’s grandmother reveals to her that she and her family are actually Jewish.
In spite of this — or perhaps because of it — Sheft, who lives in Manhattan with her mom, her twin brother and two dogs, is very committed to her Jewish identity. “Although my grandmother never really practiced Judaism, my dad was very involved in the Jewish world,” she said. “He was very passionate about Jewish causes and just Judaism, in general. So I felt very connected to the Jewish world because of him.”
The New York Jewish Week talked with Sheft about what the book means to her, why its subject matter is important and what she learned in the process of putting it together.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
New York Jewish Week: What was the process of writing the book; how did the idea begin and how did you collect your grandmother’s story?
Suzette Sheft: I had heard a lot of my grandmother’s stories from my dad. I always had an interest in the Holocaust — I would go to Holocaust museums in every city I visited, and I almost exclusively read books about World War II and the Holocaust growing up. So I kind of knew in the back of my head that I wanted to do something like this, but [my father’s death] sparked and ignited the necessity of doing it as soon as possible.
As for the process, a few summers ago I spent a week with my grandmother, interviewing her every day about her escape from Austria to France. At first she shared physical elements of her life, like her apartment and her family dynamics and her school life, but then she began to talk to me about the time leading up to the war — the years before the Germans invaded Austria. As she spoke, I recorded everything she said in bullet point form and I would periodically stop and ask for more detail. The next day, at the beginning of the conversation, I would recap what we had talked about, and then allow her to elaborate or clarify the story.
Later, I wanted to widen my perspective and uncover other stories and details that she may have forgotten, so I watched an interview she did with the USC Shoah Foundation. This was really helpful because there were some details that she had forgotten or that she had left out.
Even though the book is about your grandmother’s life, you wrote it as fiction. How much of the story came from your grandmother’s details, and how much did you have to research or create on your own?
Every event that happens is true, and everything actually happened to her, but there are some small details that I embellished. For me, it was really helpful because, while I love creativity and writing, I sometimes struggle to pick an idea. So the fact that she had all these little stories, and I could expand from those, was something I loved while writing this. I had to use fiction when describing the atmosphere of certain places and also to write the dialogue because I can’t know exactly what they said or how they said it.
Do you have a favorite story your grandma told you that you made sure to get in the book?
Inge goes to a boarding school [in France] with her host family and there the children play a game where they pick someone to be the “torturer,” who is usually whoever they think the ugliest person is. My grandma had red hair and green eyes, and I guess she wasn’t the traditional standard of beauty. They picked her to be the torturer and she would have to pull people’s hair and scratch them. There would also be a queen, who was usually the prettiest girl with blond hair and blue eyes, and she would be protected. I thought it was interesting because to me it was the children’s way of understanding what was going on in the world around them. It’s a bit complicated, but when she told me this story I was completely shocked. It was really fascinating.
For people your age, why do you think Holocaust education is still relevant and important?
Some people my age don’t know anything about the Holocaust. I recently came across a statistic that talked about how little Gen Z knew about the Holocaust. There’s also been a spike in antisemitism and a decrease in awareness of history. For example, with Kanye West, who has a lot of followers, saying antisemitic remarks, a lot of people are going to just go along with what he says. There’s also just been a lot of hate crimes towards Jewish people, especially during COVID.
Lastly, the number of living Holocaust survivors is diminishing by the day. Gen Z is the last generation probably that is ever going to have the ability and the opportunity to speak with Holocaust survivors before they’re all gone. It’s important that we share this book now and then we educate people now before it’s too late.
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Gallery in Australia Returns Painting Sold Under Nazi Duress to Heirs of German Jewish Family
The skyline of Melbourne, Australia, the capital of Victoria. Photo: Alex Proimos/Wikimedia Commons.
Australia’s oldest gallery has returned a Nazi-looted painting to the descendants of a German Jewish family whose members were forced to sell the artwork before they fled Nazi-occupied Germany in the 1930s.
The heirs of Henry and Bertha Bromberg have been fighting to reclaim “Lady With a Fan,” by 17th century Dutch painter Gerard ter Borch, from the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) for 20 years. The gallery told The Jewish Independent that it decided to return the artwork to the Bromberg family after discovering new evidence that proved the painting belonged to the family. NGV did not disclose information about the new evidence regarding the painting’s provenance.
The painting is no longer on the gallery’s website and is instead mentioned on the website for the Lost Art database that is part of the German Lost Art Foundation.
“After thoroughly assessing the painting’s background and origins, the NGV determined that the work had been owned by Dr. Henry Bromberg and was subject to a forced sale in the late 1930s, and that the heirs of Dr. Bromberg were the rightful owners of the painting,” the gallery told The Jewish Independent. “The painting was subsequently deaccessioned from the NGV Collection in 2025 and returned to the Bromberg family.”
“Lady With a Fan” was part of the NGV’s collection for 80 years, since it was purchased by the gallery in 1945. The painting was part of art collections owned by German Jews Max Emden, who left Germany in the 1920s, and Bromberg, his cousin, according to The Jewish Independent. The latter was a judge in a magistrate’s court in Hamburg who fled Europe for the US in 1938 with his wife Bertha after Nazi leader Adolf Hitler gained power in Germany, according to the Smithsonian magazine. In the 1930s, Nazis seized or sold the art collections, including “Lady With a Fan,” owned by Emden and Bromberg.
The French government returned a total of four 16th-century paintings to the Bromberg family between 2016 and 2018, and an art museum in Pennsylvania returned another 16th century artwork to the family last year. The Emden family previously reclaimed two 18th-century artworks that were seized for Hitler’s personal collection.
NGV’s return of “Lady With a Fan” is reportedly only the second time in history that an Australian museum has restituted a Nazi-looted piece of art, following the gallery’s restitution of “Head of a Man” in 2014.
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Drama Film ‘I Is Another,’ About Top Nazi Heinrich Himmler’s Masseur, to Be Presented at American Film Market
A first look at “I Is Another.” Photo: Beta Cinema
Beta Cinema has boarded international sales for Felix Randau’s German historical drama “I Is Another” about the massage therapist of Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler.
The film, starring Claes Bang (“The Square,” “The Great Arch”) as Himmler’s masseur, wrapped production on Sept. 3. Filming took place in the German cities of Leipzig, Weimar, and Vienna. Beta Cinema will present first footage to international buyers at the American Film Market (AFM) taking place from Nov. 11-16.
Set in Autumn 1952, the film follows journalist Hedda and her husband Winfried as they ambush Felix Kersten, Himmler’s former massage therapist, on a train to Oslo. Kersten says he helped thousands of concentration camp prisoners to freedom during the Nazi era, but Hedda has her doubts of his accounts. She believes Kersten fabricated details about his heroic efforts to put himself in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“What begins as an interview develops into a tense, psychological cat-and-mouse game: Kersten, rhetorically brilliant and armed with alleged evidence, encounters a stubborn opponent who relentlessly confronts him with contradictions,” read a synopsis of the film provided by Beta Cinema.
“I Is Another,” explores “the blurred lines between truth and self-mythologizing,” said Beta Cinema in a released statement. “The story of Himmler’s masseur is as controversial as it is compelling, and Claes Bang brings a powerful presence to this morally complex role.”
Randau (“Iceman”) directed the film and also wrote the script, with cinematography by Sebastian Thaler (“Transatlantic,” “7500”). The cast also includes Valerie Pachner, Susanne Wuest, Timocin Ziegler, and Martin Müller.
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At a book-lovers’ mecca, a celebration of the Jewish Diaspora
On the left side of the ground-floor gallery at the Upper East Side’s Grolier Club — an institution that bills itself as “America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles” — you’ll find elaborately decorated, centuries-old Jewish manuscripts from the likes of Italy, France and the Iberian Peninsula.
On the right, there’s a similar assortment of manuscripts, also organized geographically. These manuscripts are remnants of dynamic Jewish communities that once existed in Muslim lands such as Yemen, North African and Iran/Iraq.
Collectively, these works form “Jewish Worlds Illuminated: A Treasury of Hebrew Manuscripts from The JTS Library,” the first-ever exhibition dedicated to Jewish books and manuscripts at the storied club, which was founded in New York City in 1884.
On view through Dec. 27, the free exhibit is also the largest exhibition to date curated by the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, which is home to one of the world’s largest collections of Hebrew manuscripts and printed materials. Among the 100 objects on view are documents that date as far back as the 12th century.
The elaborately decorated works on display comprise a wide assortment of texts, such as prayer books, Passover haggadahs and ketubahs or Jewish marriage contracts. Most of them are written in Hebrew. But there are some stark differences between the two sides of the gallery: Human forms are plentiful in the manuscripts from Europe, for example, while works created by Jews in Muslim lands typically reflect the Islamic art style, with elaborate patterns, floral motifs and very few depictions of people.
“Jews adopted and adapted the art of the country in which they lived,” Sharon Lieberman Mintz, curator of Jewish art at the JTS library, explained during a private tour. “When Jews were living in Islamic lands, they eschewed figural arts. There may have been a bird or two here and there, but not humans, with rare exception.”
Examples like these spotlight the ways Jews lived their lives throughout years of diaspora, and how they integrated themselves within their culture of residence.
“If you look at the outstanding works in our collection — manuscripts in particular, but not just manuscripts — [they] reflect the geographical distribution that you see here,” said David Kraemer, the Joseph J. and Dora Abbell librarian and professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the JTS. “It is notable, but not intentional, that we don’t have material here from the land of Israel.”
Kraemer continued: “What that means is that during the ages that these works were being produced, and from which they survive, this is where Jews lived,” he said. “Very, very few Jews lived in the land of Israel, and there was very little production of this kind of material in the land of Israel.”
Left: Abraham Judah ben Yehiel of Camerino’s “Rothschild Mahzor,” from Florence, Italy in 1490. Right: A page from “Sermons and Collected Teachings,” from 17th-century Salonica, Greece. (Courtesy the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary).
Instead, the exhibit is filled with treasures from across the centuries and around the globe, including handwritten letters from the physician, rabbi, philosopher and author Moses ben Maimon — aka Maimonides. One such letter, penned in 1170 by Maimonides’ personal secretary, Mevorakh ben Nathan, is signed by the sage himself. It pleads for funds to ransom the Jews who were taken prisoner in November 1168 when the crusader king Amalric I of Jerusalem conquered the Egyptian city of Bilbeis, some 50 miles north of Cairo, which was home to a sizable Jewish community in the Middle Ages.
“So much of what happens, Jewishly, in North America is Ashkenazi-centric, which misrepresents Jewish life and history around the world,” Kraemer said. “When Ashkenaz was barely a blip, the vast majority of the world’s Jews lived in Muslim lands.”
The exhibit makes it plain just how embedded Jews were into the countries in which they lived. In the Italy section, there’s a page displayed from the Rothschild Machzor, a prayer book written by master scribe Abraham Judah ben Yehiel in Florence in 1490. An illustration depicts the children of Israel receiving the Ten Commandments as they’re decked out in the Florentine fashions of the time — with the receding hairline that was all the rage in during the Renaissance.
“When you look at these materials, you can’t just think of Jews as separated and isolated and ghettos and oppressed and all that kind of stuff,” Kraemer said. “That’s not what the story here is.”
Instead, the exhibit spotlights how Jewish communities reflected broader cultural trends, including fashion and art.
Just don’t ask the curators to select their favorites. Kraemer and Liberman Mintz both blanched when asked to choose three or four standout items in the gallery. Instead, we settled on finding particularly unusual works on display.
“The answer changes every five minutes,” Kraemer explained.
As an example, Kraemer points to a 17th-century manuscript from Salonica, Greece that he describes as “absolutely wonderful in its outrageous combination.” The page, from a collection of sermons and teachings, is a scholarly theological discussion — specifically, about how Moses, who was flesh and blood, was able to ascend to the realm of God, who is pure spirit. By contrast, the illustrations on the page — animals, birds and flowers — seem like something from a children’s book.
“Don’t we all somehow have those sensibilities built into us?” Kraemer mused. “We can be very, very sophisticated and very, very simple and childlike at the same time.”
All told, the exhibit, said Kraemer, is meant to challenge misconceptions about how Jews lived their lives during centuries of diaspora life.
“We have a lot of conceptions of what Jewish life was through the ages,” Kraemer said. “When one witnesses these materials — their splendor, their creativity, their embeddedness within the local culture, their languages, the visual language, all of that — it tells us that Jews and their neighbors were part of the same world.”
“In a world which has a very black and white vision of Jewish life and the relationship of Jewish life to the host cultures, this brings color to it,” Kraemer continued. “It wasn’t black and white. I mean both literally and figuratively — this brings color to the fullness of Jewish experience.”
“Jewish Worlds Illuminated: A Treasury of Hebrew Manuscripts from The JTS Library” is on view at The Grolier Club (47 East 60th St.) through Dec. 27. For more information, click here; to book a tour (highly recommended!) click here.
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