A poignant interview to commemorate World Holocaust Remembrance Day with Canadian composer and author Stella ter Hart. As a child, Stella knew nothing about her family’s horrific recent past, nor of her Jewish heritage. However, no secret is safe forever as the sub-title to her book, Discovering Twins, warns us. Part memoir, part biography, and part vividly re-imagined true stories, Stella discovers first through whispers and then through ancestral web site myheritage.com, not only the extraordinary prevalence of twins in her family, but that more than 1,200 members of her family perished in Auschwitz-Berkenau and labor camps including most of the sweet twins.
Her mother, born in Holland, had been trained in childhood never to reveal that she was half-Jewish and her deception was the only thing that saved her life as her cousins, aunts and uncles were rounded up and transported to hell. Weaving skillfully back and forth between present day and 1940’s Amsterdam and filled with photographs of happy, loving families lost to the Nazi gas chambers, Discovering Twins is honest, graphic, and beautifully written. Stellaterhart.com