Giza Alterwajn de Goldfarb Testimonial
By PLU Uruguay Project Team
Giza Alterwajn de Goldfarb, 79, discusses her experiences of sharing her story of surviving the Holocaust and her obligation to testify. Giza was born in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940. She was smuggled out of the Ghetto as a toddler in a suitcase and was then hidden by a Polish family. She migrated to Uruguay when she was seven.
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Giza. The Girl in The Suitcase directed by David Serrano Blanquer (2014)
Translation on the book jacket
Giza’s reencounter with her Polish sister
We believe this book to be a contribution to the active memory of the Shoah, of the imperious and sustained struggle for survival, as well as a possible attempt to grieve the loss of loved ones, which does not stop with just one generation, as stated by Judith Kestemberg, for many generations are needed to process this grief. It is, in the end, an “emotional story” that needs to be re-constructed by all…
Rosa Zynter
Translation on the book jacket
Reading a novel by Modiado during a flight from Montevideo to Barcelona pushes the narrator to research the life of two sisters marked by Nazism. Giza was born in the Warsaw Ghetto and survived because she was secretly smuggled out in a suitcase and handed over to Danusia’s family. At 16 years-old, Danusia would take care of her seriously ill new sister while fighting, heroically, against the Nazis in the Resistance Movement.
Once the war ended, Giza was ripped from Danusia and her family’s arms after learning of her biological parents’ death in Auschwitz and Treblinka. Giza and Danusia never forgot one another, never learning to overcome the other’s absence.
This is a novel conceived as a project of investigative journalism which progresses through interviews and documents revealing the fears, the losses, the silences and the incessant fight to recuperate the lost sister.
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