Excerpt: Vodka and Sprite

The worst part that Claudia found about learning more was that she suddenly realized how little she really knew. There were names, there were some dates, some places, some actions. There were people that she had never met before but she now knew shared her blood. There were more people out there just like her, with common ancestors and common feelings. Maybe even common personalities, common quirks, or perhaps her hair color came from that great great great grandmother who could bake challah like no other.

But there she was. Claudia had grown up in America with parents who had wanted to forget anything to do with their families. She didn't speak any language of her ancestors and no traditions had been handed down. Thousands of miles away from where her family had started, where they had farmed their land, tilled their soil, and done honest days of work until they were honored in religious funerals. To make matters and souls worse, carefully kept records had been burned and destroyed by Nazi's and Communists. It had not been bad enough for them to exterminate an entire league of people, but they also had taken away the comfort of knowing the names of who you belonged to.

In that search for names and people, Claudia found page after page of documents with the same last name as herself. People that lived in different- yet surrounding- towns, with different occupations. She would never know if these were relatives. It gave her a sick feeling in her stomach. Not only would she never know her Grandfather's cousins, aunts, uncles, great grandparents, and every one in between. Not only that, but these people all perish the exact same way that her family did. They were all Holocaust victims.

If they weren't her own family, they were someone's family. And that someone lost family just as Claudia did.