Celia Clement

Three Sisters:  A True Holocaust Story of Love Luck and Survival is my first book.  As a child of two Holocaust survivors I wanted to preserve the story of my mother and her family’s escape. I was fortunate that she and her two sisters left memoirs which served to steer the story from their perspectives. Most Holocaust stories are “based on a true story” which means the facts have been changed or embellished to make the story more compelling. This leads the reader to wonder what was real and what facts were invented. I wanted to offer a completely factual account so that readers wouldn’t be left wondering.

Publishers want books that  sell, and that means  turning  Holocaust memoirs into fictionalized novels. I am hoping that this real account will be more compelling and provide more useful information about the lives of Jews during the Holocaust. My mother and her sisters provide many details about their day to day experience, how they survived, what they ate, how they felt, and how they managed to cope.

Both of my parents were Holocaust survivors who fled Leipzig Germany. My father, Raphael Littauer, was on the Kindertransport and was raised by a family in England. My mother, Alexandra Kroch Littauer is the voice of one of the three sisters in this book. Though my mother ultimately allowed herself to be interviewed when I was a young adult, my father never agreed to tell his story. It wasn’t until after he had died, that I learned that he had been on the Kindertransport.

I worked for over 30 years as a school social worker, and during that time I focused on bully prevention, and response. I developed several programs for elementary, middle and high schools that promote healthy school cultures by empowering students to become upstanders. I have also presented bullying awareness and upstander training to students of every grade and have also offered workshops addressing bullying and cyber bullying to community groups, parent groups, day care, and school staff.

It has not been until recently that I made the connections between my work addressing bullying prevention and my relationship to the Holocaust. Over the past few years, I have volunteered to be a Holocaust educator in schools throughout the area. When presenting to students, I draw parallels between Holocaust resistance fighters and rescuers, and the roles they can take today as allies who stand up to hate. During these presentations I read examples from the Three Sisters that highlight the situations the young girls faced, such as antisemitism and their reliance on the help of brave rescuers.

Over the past few years, I identified for the first time as a 2 G (A second generation Holocaust survivor).  I had never known the term until I was recruited by a close friend from childhood who asked me to help her to organize a local chapter for descendants of Holocaust survivors. She and I grew up together, our parents were friends, but I never knew that her parents were also Holocaust survivors. It was nothing we ever spoke about.

I received my BA from Cornell in 1977 and graduated in 1980 from Columbia University with a master’s in social work. Though retired as a school social worker in 2018, I spent the following two years working part time as a consultant in a local elementary school where I had been hired to implement my student led bully prevention program.

I live in an 1830s farmhouse in Upstate New York. There my husband and I raised three children, and now live quietly with our two cats and very small dog. I love to prepare elaborate ethnic meals, enjoy reading, gardening and travelling.