We are sad to learn of the passing of Kurt Messerschmidt, Holocaust survivor, educator and beloved cantor. He was 102. Messerschmidt was born Jan. 2, 1915 in Weneuchen, Germany, but moved to Berlin in 1918 and excelled as a linguistics scholar, gymnast and musician. He was well-respected and a leader among his classmates and teachers, but was unable to attend college because of anti-Jewish measures implemented by the Nazis.

Maria Zalewska grew up in what acclaimed writer and journalist Martin Pollack calls the “contaminated landscapes” of Eastern Europe, where most of the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps were built. Her physical proximity to spaces of the Shoah, as well as her familial relationships to victims of Auschwitz-Birkenau, drew her initially toward the study of the different ways in which Eastern Europeans filled, organized and produced spaces of memory.