Her mother turned to her and said, “Your PopPop, (grandfather) survived the Holocaust. But don’t ask him about it. It upsets him.”

“Initially, I accepted the information and moved on,” Samantha said in an interview with the Lake Placid News and The Virginia Gazette. “As a little kid, I didn’t truly understand the scope of the tragedy. I wasn’t particularly in touch with my Jewish heritage, either.

“My mother grew up Catholic and I was raised in a home that celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah, Easter and Passover,” Farkas continued. “If anything, I felt more Christian than Jewish. I attended a Quaker school and we had reenacted the Nativity every December. The Holocaust to me remained a foreign catastrophe that happened a long time ago.”

What she felt, Samantha explained, was a kind of disassociation from the whole concept of the Holocaust. But when she got older, she grew increasingly curious and turned to writing fictionalized accounts of the Holocaust, well before she was aware of the true facts.

She traveled to Spain, where she witnessed a certain degree of anti-Semitism. Than, while visiting England she had her first foray into family history. A cousin, from her grandmother side, filled in some gaps. But she wanted to know the whole story.

In the 1990s, her grandfather, Jacob “Jack” Farkas, agreed to give a filmed deposition to the Steven Spielberg sponsored Shoah Foundation. It was an eight-hour long narrative about his life leading up to the Holocaust, and how he had survived it.

“I was there when he gave the tapes to my father and rather forcefully said: “You can watch them when I am dead.” Samantha recalled. “PopPop, never wanted to discuss the Holocaust.”

As time went by, her grandfather, however, started to talk about his experiences in the Nazi death camps.

“Not a lot, just basic information: how old he was at that time and about his sisters, who survived and are now living in Israel. He urged me visit Israel and meet them.”

From bits of information Samantha learned that his grandfather, at that time 13 years old, survived the selection process by Dr. Josef Mengele, the notorious SS officer, with the power to decide who will live and who would die, by inserting bricks into his shoes to look taller.

“As I said, I didn’t know anything about his story until this past summer,” Samantha added. “Everything was new. It was like reading a book for the first time.”

Professor Henry Hart of the English department. at William & Mary, himself a noted biographer and award winning poet, called Samantha “one of our best students.” She received the first Concord Traveling Fellowship, enabling her to travel to Israel with her grandfather to interview family members who also survived the Holocaust.

There she met his sisters, Rachel and Bracha.

Rachel brought out old photo albums, which contained pictures from 1930s and 1940s. Those allowed me glimpses of my family before tragedy struck. Bracha was very different. Image elderly Rose from Titanic.

“Instead of tragedy, Bracha showed me recovery. She showered me in photographs of her travels around the world, as to say that she had pulled through hardship to live a long fulfilling life. … And that gave me the central theme of my project: I honor my family not because they died, but because they lived. Before they were numbers, they were names… I think that’s how they would want to be remembered. Not for their death, but for their lives.”

“Samantha has been writing about her trip and what she learned,” Hart said. “She received the Concord Traveling Fellowship, endowed by Dave Gunton, one of my former students, because of her talent for story telling.”

Frank Shatz lives in Williamsburg, Virginia, and Lake Placid. His column was reprinted with permission from The Virginia Gazette. He is the author of “Reports from a Distant Place” a compilation of his selected columns.