Why I built this
I was born in Venezuela, in a Catholic family. The God they taught me about never fit. He loved you, but he also punished you. One day I stopped trying to believe, and I walked away. I'm not part of any religion now.
What I didn't grow up knowing is where I really come from. My mother's family came from Drohobycz, in what was then Polish Galicia, near the Russian border. Today that town is in Ukraine. They were Jews, and they were comfortably off. My great-great-grandfather Kraus owned land there. One day oil was discovered under it, and the family became wealthy. His granddaughter, my great-grandmother Eleonora, graduated as a pianist from the Conservatory of Lvov. They had a Steinway & Sons grand piano that they never saw again.
When the war came, the Nazis put Eleonora on a train bound for Bełżec, a death camp where most of the Jews of Drohobycz and Lvov were sent. Somewhere along the way, she jumped. She died doing it. Before they took her, she had already gotten her young daughter out, sending her to live with Jewish relatives who were passing as Catholic with false papers in another part of Poland. There was also a Catholic nurse in that house who helped take care of her. That little girl became my grandmother Eva.
Her father, my great-grandfather Bernardo, was not a man of war. He was young, a university-educated professional, married, the father of a four-year-old girl. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, his country drafted him anyway. The Nazis captured him and he spent the rest of the war as a prisoner. He survived. While Eva was still living with the family that had hidden her, she figured out on her own that her mother was dead. Nobody told her directly. She understood it from the condolences. When her father finally came back for her after the war, that was the day she learned he had remarried and that she now had a stepmother and a stepsister.
What was left of that family came to Venezuela after the war. My other grandfather, Gianni Policastro, lived through his own war in Naples, Italy, eating raw onions in the middle of the scarcity that the Second World War brought down on everyone around him. He was always reading, always studying, always curious. His grandmother wanted him to become a priest and put him in a Catholic seminary, but my grandfather jumped over a wall and escaped. From that moment on, he knew himself to be an atheist and a freethinker, a rebel against dogmas. Eventually he made it to Venezuela, and that's where he and Eva met. My father's family came from Spain, survivors of the civil war there. Every branch of me traces back to people who fled twentieth century Europe and started over in the Americas.
Almost none of this was ever talked about. On my mother's side, Poland was a room nobody went in, and the Jewish part was a room inside that room. My grandmother Eva changed the subject every time it came close. My grandfather Gianni was an atheist, so religion was off the table, and being Jewish got swept out with it. By blood, through Eva and through my mother, I'm Jewish. I just grew up not knowing the shape of what I'd lost.
I'm in my forties now. I have chronic breathing problems and a low hum of stress I can't turn off, and I don't think all of that is only mine. I think some of it belongs to the women who came before me and never got to breathe out. I think some of it belongs to the silence.
I'm not trying to become religious. I just want to know where I come from. The history, the culture, the food, the music, the jokes, the books, the language, and yes, the religion too, not to practice it but because you can't really know a people without knowing what they believed in. And I want to feel it, not just understand it. I've spent my whole life living in my head, and now I'm trying to learn how to let the story pass through me instead of around me.
I'm building this because I know I'm not the only one. There are people everywhere whose grandparents survived by hiding, whose mothers were told not to talk, whose fathers buried it under a new country or a new name. Most of them don't want to become religious either. Most of them are tired of being told the only options are all of it or nothing at all. So I'm making the thing I wish had existed when I started looking. A quiet, simple place where you can walk back to where you came from, at your own pace, in your own way.
It's not a synagogue. It's not a class. It's not a therapist. It's just a door left open, and a voice that says: come in, take your time, you don't have to be anything you're not.
This is mine. And if any of it sounds familiar, then it's also yours.