A tale of Holocaust pain, forgiveness and survival

As Karen Kaplan stood in front of her father’s childhood home in Poland, all of her anger and resentment was lifted off her shoulders, she said.

“I had released these emotions of anger that I had towards all the perpetrators [who] killed my father’s family,” she told The Press in a phone interview from her native Chicago.

Ms. Kaplan will be at Atria Riverdale on July 10 and The Riverdale Y on July 12 to talk about her memoir, Descendants of Rajgród: Learning to Forgive. In it, she discusses her father’s Holocaust survival story and her own struggle with forgiveness.

The father, Arie Kaplan, was 19 when he watched his mother and sisters die during the Nazi invasion of Rajgrod, Poland. The teenager survived by hiding and then running away to the forests, but by the time he came to America after World War II, Mr. Kaplan had been overcome by bitterness and pain.

“He wasn’t able to process any of these emotions that he carried with him,” Ms. Kaplan said. “He spewed all this negativity on the ones closest to him – my mother, my brothers and me.”

Her father would often turn “abusive,” tormenting his loved ones and inflicting emotional scars that persisted for years, she said.

“I just was not feeling happy, and I just didn’t understand where this unhappiness came from,” she said. “When I worked with a therapist, she saw that I carried a lot of anger inside of me and she said it emanated from my childhood.”

The therapist told Ms. Kaplan she needed to forgive her father before he died. “So I learned to forgive my father on his deathbed,” she said.

Shortly afterward, Ms. Kaplan wrote her memoir. And she visited her father’s childhood home in Rajgrod.  

“It’s important for me to share my message and talk about forgiveness,” she said. “By writing this book, I’m hoping that more people will go back to their families, friends, and coworkers and have this type of discussion.”

While she was writing, Ms. Kaplan recalled an invasion of her own home. No one was hurt, but an attacker held Ms. Kaplan and two of her children at gunpoint in their house. She discusses the incident in her book.

“I could have continue to carry this anger and resentment and be the victim my entire life and just go through life as a survivor,” she said. “I decided that it was going to stop with me, that I didn’t want to pass on this [suffering] to my children.”