These are stories I have been wanting to tell for a very long time. Ever since, in my early twenties, I started interviewing my family and their friends about how they, as Jews in Nazi-Germany, managed to survive the Holocaust.
But even though I, over the years, have gathered a lot of material about what happened to my grandparents and their gang before, during and after the war, I still did not dare to write about it. Partly because I feared I would not be able to do them justice, but also because every single person’s story was more dramatic than most novels I had read. And I simply did not know how to string them together in a coherent way.
It was my oldest son, some fifteen years later, who gave me the idea of how it could be done. I had just told him the story about the valuables my great grandfather, Hermann Isakowitz, buried on in his land before he disappeared. A story that was just about the only thing my grandfather told his children about the time before he came to Sweden. Having four Holocaust survivors as grandparents, to me this was just one story amongst many. But to my son it was something completely different. It was a realisation that our family had a treasure. And a treasure, he said, you must go and find.
I immediately realised he was right. When an opportunity to go on a treasure hunt appears one should naturally take it. But furthermore, it also dawned upon me that such a trip might be a way to tie all these dramatic stories together.
However, it took a while before we got going. First followed two years of research. I talked to scholars and contacted archives all over the world. I emailed historians, genealogists, museums and anyone else that I thought might help me find out more about what happened to my family and the place where my great grandfather used to live.
And then, in the summer of 2012, my son, my father and I went on a roadtrip from Sweden to Poland. It was a remarkable journey that I am sure I will never forget and that, two years later, resulted in Herr Isakowitz’s treasure. A book that, after almost twenty years time, I finally worked up the courage to write.