The inspiration originally came to Alana Kreshtool Snyder while reading age-appropriate books about race, social justice and gender identity to her two young daughters.
“I realized if I can have these really tough conversations with my kids about racism, I should be able to introduce the topic of the Holocaust — which is so important to me and our family — in a way that is appropriate for my really young children,” said Snyder, 33, a Pikesville native and resident. “It can be something my daughters will always remember growing up knowing.”
The seed was planted for Snyder, who works as an early intervention teacher for Baltimore County Public Schools, to author a book about the Holocaust for young kids. She started by chatting with a friend’s sister who is a published author and encouraged her to write about what she knew.
“That put into my mind this idea of looking at it from the perspective of a grandchild to a grandparent,” Snyder said, “and having the book focus more on their relationship and their lives, as opposed to war or Holocaust or anything scary.”
The book, “Grandma is a Survivor” (Mascot Kids), comes out in October.
Snyder said once she wrote the book’s outline, she submitted it to publishers and heard back quickly from the Herndon, Virginia-based Mascot Kids. A special part of the process, she said, was finding the right illustrator.
“I got to pick an illustrator [Junika Satyanagara] to work with, which was really cool because I went to Carver [Center for Arts and Technology] for art and I love design and art and all those kinds of creative outlets,” said Snyder. “The illustration was a really important piece for me.”
Snyder, a graduate of Pikesvillle’s Krieger Schechter Day School, has vivid childhood memories of visiting her Polish-born maternal grandmother, Bernice Bram Horon, at the latter’s home on a farm in rural Pennsylvania.
“When we would go visit her, we would do a lot of the same things each time,” Snyder said. “There would be food waiting for us — cantaloupe, tuna salad and soda. And we would pack a picnic and go to this park that she loved, and we would swim and catch salamanders. My grandma loved being in nature. So in writing the book, I thought about all of the things that I was able to do with her for so many years, and then I thought about how different her childhood was compared to my childhood.”
Through her lens as a child, Snyder strove to make the Holocaust accessible to kids. Especially with antisemitism on the rise and studies showing that Millennials and Gen Z lack basic knowledge of the Shoah, Snyder said she understood the importance of starting Holocaust education early.
“The way I broke it down for little, little ones was that grandma didn’t have a lot of food when she was growing up, or she didn’t have a bed, or she didn’t have a coat, or she didn’t always get to see her mom,” Snyder said. “So nothing specific about people starving or dying. You don’t want to do an injustice to all of the suffering and trauma that happened, but my goal was to be able to read it with my 3-year-old.”
Horon was born in the southern Polish city of Częstochowa, once home to a vibrant Jewish community. Only four of her 70-plus family members survived the Holocaust. She ended up in a displaced persons camp in Sweden after World War II and came to the United States with her husband, Ira, by way of New York City before relocating to rural Pennsylvania.
Horon died in June of 2015 at the age of 91. For the past few years, Snyder’s family has visited the park that Horon loved in Pennsylvania on May 4, Horon’s date of liberation from a concentration camp. (In 2021, Snyder founded 3GBMORE, a group for local grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. For information, email 3GBMORE@gmail.com.)
“She always said that she was gifted 70 extra years, that every day was really a gift after what she had gone through,” Snyder said of her grandmother. “She definitely lived life very fully. She always valued her religion and being Jewish and was happy to raise her family Jewish. She was always enjoying and making the most of what she considered extra time. The book has provided a pathway for my daughters to honor my grandma’s legacy. L’dor va’dor, from generation to generation.”
Anna Lippe is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer.
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