Hidden in Plain Sight: Interview with Julie Brill
Cristina Gaskievicz
Julie Brill’s Hidden in Plain Sight is a Holocaust memoir of a daughter’s journey to uncover the secrets of her family heritage. Brill’s father was a young boy who managed to survive the Holocaust while in Belgrade despite the fact that he hadn’t been sent to a work camp or had really even been in hiding. After both of Brill’s daughters leave for college, Brill dedicates her time fully to researching and learning the history of her family. In the book that emerges, Brill demonstrates how important it is to honor and remember Jewish history as well as give a voice to the Serbian Jewish lives that were lost, and whose story hasn’t been fully heard till now.
Cristina Gaskievicz: I thought it was genius the way you started and ended your book in Belgrade. When you first began writing and creating the initial drafts, did you already have this idea present, or did it come later when you were finishing Hidden in Plain Sight?
Julie Brill: I started writing Hidden in Plain Sight in 2017 and the scene that opens the book, in which my father directs my daughter as she navigates with Google Maps through his childhood neighborhood in Belgrade, Serbia, was fresh in my mind. I knew early on that scene would open my memoir because it’s the moment when the possibility of traveling to Belgrade begins to germinate. It might seem a little ridiculous, but that moment for me is when Belgrade becomes a real place we could fly to. I grew up listening to my father’s stories of being a young child during the German occupation there in World War 2. And Belgrade always seemed unreachable, like a kind of Oz. There were so many barriers to going: time and money, Communism, language, distance, the Balkan Wars. Seeing it on my daughter’s laptop while my dad told us what we’d find around the next corner blended the past and present in a way that made it feel accessible.
One of the challenges of writing was when I started, I was still living the story. That was helpful because I could record memories and emotions that might have faded. And I was also building the plane while flying it. I couldn’t write towards the ending, because the ending hadn’t happened yet. That meant rewriting once I knew the full arc so I could write towards the ending.
CG: In the first chapter of Hidden in Plain Sight, you mention one of the key factors of why it was so important for both you and your father to travel to Belgrade. You write, “His foundational stories became mine — his memories almost like my own. This phenomenon of inherited memories is common in the children of Holocaust survivors.” At what point did you begin to recognize this dynamic in your relationship with your father?
JB: On some level, of course I knew since early childhood how foundational my father’s stories were for me. But it was only when I started this project and began to reexamine his stories and how I learned them, that I came to really understand. I read many 2G and 3G (children and grandchildren of survivors) accounts, and I began to comprehend the universality of this experience among Holocaust descendants. Most parents share their childhood memories with their children, and for my father and survivors of his generation, many of those stories were war stories. So, we learned Holocaust history from the very specific to the more general. That’s the opposite of how history is generally studied. I’m grateful my father shared his stories. They are an important part of who he is and of our family history. There are many families where survivors could not talk about what happened, which must be so confusing for their children and grandchildren.
CG: Something I was able to relate to very closely was your experience with trying and learning Hebrew. I myself navigate between English and Spanish. What, in your opinion, was the hardest part of this experience, and what would you recommend to anyone who wants to learn a language later on in their life?
JB: I grew up hearing my father and his friends speak Hebrew, but no one spoke it to me and so I never learned it. I wanted to crack the code but even as an adult, I illogically believed that because I had never learned Hebrew, it meant it was impossible for me to do so. That I can now speak baby Hebrew makes me want to discover and overturn every other unexamined belief of mine that is holding me back. Even saying simple things is just so satisfying. Hebrew isn’t like Spanish or French, in that it’s completely unrelated to English. So many facets are difficult for an English speaker, and I know I could be conversational, but I’ll never be truly fluent. I can hear my American accent, even my Boston accent, in my Hebrew but I can’t correct it. That’s frustrating and so is the process of learning, forgetting, and relearning that seems to be part of acquiring a language.
CG: I loved reading that your father’s account is the final piece of the puzzle to your research and will benefit the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade. What have you personally learned from your father?
JB: I’ve learned resiliency from my father. We hear about intergenerational trauma and there is also intergenerational resiliency, the ability to get back up and keep going. He came to the U.S. in his twenties to go to school and he worked like an immigrant here for forty years. My father felt protected and deeply loved by his mother and he passed that on as well.
CG: You make a point of telling readers how important it was for your daughters to understand their Jewish identity as well as making the effort to teach them Jewish history. How should Holocaust history be taught in your opinion? And is there anything specific you did in teaching your daughters that you would recommend?
JB: When I was learning about the Holocaust as a preteen in the early 1980s, World War 2 was a memory for everyone over forty. It was so raw and recent, and I think we learned about it too fast and without age-appropriate filters. I’m talking about my experience in Hebrew school. In public school, we didn’t learn about it at all. I was obsessed and read every book in my library on the Holocaust. It was traumatizing for me, and I worried about how I would hide and run if it happened in the U.S. So, starting in high school and through my children’s childhoods, I tried to put the Holocaust out of my mind. Of course, that’s not really an effective strategy. But when my kids were little, I tried to shield them from history and current events, so they didn’t know as much as I had at their age. My father told them about his experiences and what happened to his father, and we talked about that, but they didn’t have much of the larger story until later. I think there can be a better medium, between my extreme of wondering who would hide me when the Nazis came, and the bubble I tried to create for my kids. As I write about in the book, as adults they both traveled to Serbia and learned details of our family history in real time as I did.
CG: You discuss your entry into motherhood and the importance of capturing memories. While facing the challenges of being a new mom, you write, “Nothing for me could be hard because I had a golden life,” which references you not having had to live during the Holocaust. Do you still find yourself living by this rule or have you managed to move away from it by having written this book?
JB: Writing the book has helped me soften the rule, both by facing this history more head on and by spending time with other descendants of survivors.
CG: While I was reading Hidden in Plain Sight, I kept thinking about the title and the ways it reflected both the experience of Serbian Jews during the Holocaust and how your family’s identity was hiding in plain sight. Could you talk a bit about your title and why you chose it?
JB: When I was a kid, we had four pictures of my father and his family taken in Belgrade. They were in an envelope in a drawer somewhere, and periodically they’d surface. I remember studying them, trying to understand what my father was like as a child and who my grandparents were, because I never got to meet them. We had my grandparents’ wedding photo and two pictures of them with my dad from before the war. The fourth image was of my father and aunt. They are standing on the street during the German occupation. It was amazing that any of the photos had survived, but the one from during the war was the one I was most fascinated by. How could it exist? Here were two Jewish children, clearly not hiding. I knew that my grandfather disappeared before my aunt was born, so I imagined my grandmother had the photo taken so she’d be able to show him if they were reunited. My drive to understand how my father survived the war, how this picture was taken after the Nazis declared Belgrade judenfrei, free of Jews, is what drove me to research and write this book. The title encaptures what the children are: they are hidden in plain sight.
CG: With the immense amount of pain and suffering the Holocaust caused millions, it’s discouraging to realize it isn’t the most recent genocide. You write, “The term genocide didn’t even exist until 1944.” Do you have any suggestions as to how we can improve discussions about genocide to better educate people on recognizing and calling it out?
JB: I think a lot about the how and why of Holocaust education. I don’t have all the answers, but we have to teach people, especially young people, how it happened. It didn’t start with mass murder. It started with hatred, discrimination, and a climate of fear. When we talk about the Holocaust we say “never again,” and yet it has happened again to other vulnerable groups around the globe. Part of Holocaust education should include talking about other genocides and their similarities and differences, so we know how to be vigilant. Here in the U.S., our government just stopped observing International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Juneteenth, Black History Month, Martin Luther King Day, and Pride Month. And then Google removed them from their calendar. These actions are symbolic and significant. And because of the greater urgency of human suffering caused by the Administration, they’ve gone largely unnoticed. So many frightening things are happening at once.
