Buried Rivers: A Spiritual Journey Into the Holocaust

After the Holocaust, how do we not lose faith in each other—or in ourselves? This 2nd generation Holocaust memoir explores the powerful bonds between the living and the dead—against the backdrop of generational trauma.

To the disappointment of her parents, Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, the author began following a Buddhist teacher at the age of 19. Though her parents were not particularly religious, they felt betrayed and, with the help of a domineering uncle, took strong measures to try to pull her away from what they believed was a cult.

Over three decades later, on a German train, Ellen felt the presence of spirits who had died in the Holocaust and had lost all trust in basic goodness. Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, their plea for help sent her on a series of life-changing journeys to Poland to reconcile the Holocaust with basic goodness. Could her years of meditation finally prove helpful to her family lineage instead of a betrayal?

In 2006, she travels to Poland, the Holocaust’s largest graveyard, and to her mother’s city of Łódź, to reconnect with her family's tragic history while exploring basic goodness—not theoretically, but in her bodily experience. In 2009, she moves to Łódź to study Polish at a language school called “Babel,” where she is the only American in a class comprised largely of Arabs. With no elders still alive to consult, she relies on an account dictated before his death by her bullying uncle, an Auschwitz survivor, for clues to her family’s past.

As she retraces her mother’s and uncle’s steps through Europe and walks in the places where her ancestors lived for centuries, she stumbles into a mysterious stream of love—if only she can receive it. Increasingly aware of her own traumatic imprints, she realizes that helping the dead is inseparable from healing her own wounds. And that opening to the darkness we habitually avoid brings a transformation that widens our perception and changes us forever.

Beyond recovering her family’s lost history, this compelling memoir reveals powerful connections between spirituality and trauma, and intimately explores the challenges of family loyalty, crossing religious boundaries, and opening to the invisible blessings of ancestors. With unflinching emotional honesty and deep inquiry, channeled through a poetic spirit, “Buried Rivers” reveals how healing, magic, and life itself can transform fear and open our hearts despite unimaginable suffering.