Not only bodies, but habits. Not only memories, but objects, languages, gestures, and fears carried quietly into ordinary lives. This reflective essay explores the legacy of Holocaust survivor and artist Marianne Grant through the testimony of her daughter, Geraldine Shenkin, tracing how trauma, care, and resistance are transmitted across generations. Based on a conversation between Barbara Walshe and Geraldine Shenkin, it examines survival not as an endpoint, but as an ongoing ethical relationship between the past and those who inherit it—through everyday objects, artistic practice, and the fragile act of remembering itself.
(A reflective essay based on a conversation between Barbara Walshe and Geraldine Shenkin, Marianne Grant’s daughter).
Fragile beginnings
The conversation begins, disarmingly, with everyday logistics: a device that will not sit steady, a camera angle that feels wrong, a phone upgrade that has “changed everything.” Yet this opening is not incidental. It anticipates what will later become the central theme of the testimony itself: how fragile the channels of transmission can be—how easily a story of survival might be distorted, interrupted, or lost. And still, the story goes on.
Geraldine Shenkin lives in Glasgow, within a few miles of where she was born, surrounded by an ordinary architecture of continuity: marriage, two daughters, five grandchildren. She speaks from a life that is recognisably settled. But the conversation’s deeper current is that settlement does not cancel rupture. It contains it.
Geraldine’s childhood, she says, was marked by a persistent sense of difference. The household’s “common language” was German—shared by her parents and her grandmother, carried into Glasgow from elsewhere—and Geraldine “loathed” it as a child. The language itself becomes a sign of displacement, an audible reminder that the home she inhabits is unfamiliar as well as a post-catastrophic refuge. Friends later noticed her parents’ accents; Geraldine did not—“it was just Mum and Dad.” The distinction matters. In the child’s perspective, difference is not exotic; it is intimate. It is ordinary. But the household still recognised that language could render children vulnerable: Geraldine and her siblings were sent to elocution lessons “in order that we pronounce English properly.” Assimilation is presented here not as ideology but as precaution, a quiet technique to encourage safety and strengthen belonging.
The everyday after catastrophe: objects, habit, and embodied inheritance
From language, the conversation shifts to objects—paper, food, newspapers—and it is here that the moral grammar of post-traumatic life becomes visible. Geraldine describes her mother’s inability to discard anything: envelopes written on “every bit,” birthday cards reused as notepads, newspapers stacked and stored for future use. This is not merely frugality. It is a lived theory of dispossession: when everything has once been taken, waste becomes ethically intolerable.
Geraldine still keeps one of her mother’s repurposed cards and shows it to schoolchildren. The pedagogical gesture is telling. She does not instruct by abstraction; she teaches through material culture. The card becomes an artefact of a survival economy, a small object that carries an argument: the past is not only remembered, it is enacted in habits—habits of keeping, saving, reusing, fearing loss.
The same logic governs food. “We could never leave anything on our plate,” Geraldine recalls. Even now she resists discarding anything past a “best before” date, and her explanation expands from the personal to the global—“you think of all the starving people.” Trauma here is not a closed private wound; it becomes a moral lens through which the world is constantly judged. The past shapes not only memory but conscience.
This material ethic is mirrored by an equally embodied inheritance. Geraldine learns as a teenager that her mother had been “in the gas chambers… three times,” and the knowledge does not remain cognitive. It transforms sensation: the smell of gas becomes nauseating, “retching,” incompatible with domestic life. Geraldine cannot tolerate gas cookers; even Jewish ritual is disrupted, because striking a match and lighting Sabbath candles evokes fire and threat. She eventually “overcomes” the reaction—but the point is that knowledge has become physiological y. The trauma of one generation migrates into the sensory system of the next.
The conversation returns to another key inheritance: distrust. Geraldine’s mother hides her handbag inside a plastic carrier bag so it will not attract attention; she cannot trust “anybody.” Geraldine recognises the logic—“a total breakdown of trust”—and then names its psychological consequences in herself: she is “a terrible worrier,” inclined toward pessimism and anticipatory fear. The testimony here does not romanticise legacy. It makes visible the cost of survival when survival becomes a permanent state of vigilance.
And yet Geraldine experience tells her that her mother was also “the friendliest, warmest, intelligent lady,” deeply sociable, loved by neighbours, capable of humour, and astonishingly competent with languages. That duality is essential: the survivor is not only a victim. She is a person—warmth and suspicion, humour and dread, generosity and hoarding, courage and fear—held together uneasily.
If the first half of the conversation is about how the Holocaust persists in the everyday, the second half is about how it is transformed—through art—into an intentional legacy.
Art, recognition, and the ethics of transmission
Marianne Grant’s artistic talent, Geraldine argues, “saved her life through the whole war many times.” In Theresienstadt, Marianne works in agriculture and spends her limited “spare time” making art and crafts with children—small acts of imaginative care under coercion. Later, in Auschwitz, she decorates the walls of the children’s block with fairy-tale imagery—Snow White, Bambi, Mickey Mouse, sunshine, mountains. The images are not escapism; they are a counter-environment. Marianne’s remark that there were “no trees” and no birds, only thick yellow mud, underscores what the murals oppose: not simply ugliness, but the deliberate stripping away of life’s ordinary colours. “She wanted to give the children a bit of colour in their lives,” Geraldine says—a sentence that functions as an ethical thesis.
But the conversation does not allow this thesis to become sentimental. Geraldine also describes Marianne being summoned to Josef Mengele and forced to draw markings of children—twins—used in experiments, as well as “Gypsy family trees.” The scene is narrated with minimal embellishment: Mengele “never spoke,” marched in “black shiny boots,” pointed; Marianne understood that “if she made an ink blot, she’d be finished.” Here, the same skill that makes murals possible also makes documentation of atrocity possible. Art becomes both refuge and instrument, both the creation of beauty and the forced rendering of violence. The title “Painting for My Life” is therefore not metaphorical. It is literal.
This is where the conversation’s most striking reflective turn occurs. While writing an epilogue for the book created with Glasgow Museums, Geraldine realises the bitter irony: Mengele’s obsession with twins aimed at racial eradication, and yet Geraldine herself is a twin; her mother gave birth to twins. “He failed,” she says. The claim is not triumphalist—nothing “undoes” what happened—but it locates a thin line of historical resistance in continuity itself. Survival, in this reading, is not only endurance. It is the denial of the perpetrator’s intended finality.
The essayistic depth of Geraldine’s testimony is amplified by two episodes of unexpected encounter—moments when memory returns via others, as if the past insists on meeting the present in public.
At an International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance event in Glasgow in 2024, two Slovak men approach Geraldine with “best wishes” from Dita Kraus, known as “the Librarian of Auschwitz.” Geraldine’s reaction is visceral: she nearly falls. Dita is not an abstract figure; she is a person her parents once knew, now suddenly alive and reaching out. Geraldine travels to meet her, and in three hours learns new dimensions of her mother’s and grandmother’s lives. She discovers that after liberation, Dita lived with Marianne and her mother in Bergen-Belsen; that Dita’s mother died; that Marianne arranged transport for Dita back to Prague and promised to secure a proper burial.
This is an important counter-narrative to popular accounts of survival. It frames the survivor not only as a recipient of rescue but also as an agent of care for others, even amid catastrophe. The ethical question shifts from “How did she live?” to “How did she keep others human—how did she keep herself human—while living?”.
The second episode involves Ella Weissenberger and the hand-painted Hansel and Gretel storybook created in Theresienstadt. Ella does not recognise Marianne’s name at first—not even the nickname “Mosey.” Yet the recognition arrives later through an image. In a café, Geraldine opens a catalogue and turns to the page with the storybook illustrations. Ella grips Geraldine tightly and reveals, from beneath the table, a scroll: a photocopy of one of those drawings, given to her that morning because she recognised it from her own childhood. The discovery is psychologically precise: memory is not only verbal; it is visual, bodily, instantaneous. Geraldine cannot sleep for days.
In these moments, the essay’s guiding question—what survives when everything is taken?—receives a complex answer. What survives is not only a set of facts but a network of recognitions: a drawing remembered, a friendship renewed, a promise fulfilled, an object preserved, a name recovered from ivy and the resilience of human beings.
The return to Prague in 1993 further complicates the notion of survival. At the airport, Marianne cries uncontrollably—an unusual eruption in a woman who described herself as often “numb.” The family visits her father’s grave; they then visit the apartment where she grew up, entering without warning, invited in by a stranger charmed by Marianne’s fluent Czech. Geraldine’s tears here are not only empathy. They are the affective charge of stepping into a space that was once theirs and is now another’s—of confronting the physical normality of stolen continuity. The scene holds an implicit ethical tension: the current resident may not have known the apartment’s history; yet the history is now present in the doorway. The past is not politely distant It is present.
A final axis of the conversation is the shift from private memory to public testimony. Geraldine suggests her mother began speaking openly after Geraldine’s father died in 1986. The explanation is both personal and historical: it was too painful for the couple to speak earlier given their compounded losses; and Britain lacked a public framework for recognition until later developments such as Holocaust Memorial Day. The point is not merely temporal. It is structural: testimony needs an audience capable of hearing it. When the social conditions change, the private story becomes a civic responsibility.
The conversation then anchors this civic responsibility in the present. Geraldine notes rising antisemitism following 7 October and describes it as echoing the incremental restrictions her mother reported—being barred from school, cinema, public life. The past is not invoked as analogy for effect; it is invoked as warning grounded in remembered pattern: exclusion often arrives in stages that appear “small” until they are not. In this sense, Marianne’s legacy is not only commemorative. It is diagnostic.
And then we return—quietly but decisively—to the question of transmission. Geraldine’s grandchildren “know so much.” A fragment of Marianne’s mural practice—Mickey Mouse, Snow White, toadstools—becomes a framed heirloom hanging in a child’s bedroom. A granddaughter, age nine, writes and delivers a Holocaust Memorial Day speech at a non-Jewish school; a rabbi attends to listen. Here, legacy is neither museumification nor myth. It is a living act: a child speaking in her own words, not because she witnessed the past but because she inherits responsibility for it.
If this essay has a closing claim, it is that Marianne Grant’s legacy survives through a triad: material traces, aesthetic resistance, and intergenerational speech. The traces are humble—cards, envelopes, newspapers, a trunk, a roll of paper—yet they encode an entire ethics of post-traumatic life. The resistance is not abstract; it is painted, drawn, and risked under threat. And the speech is not automatic; it is cultivated, chosen, repeated—by a daughter who admits she wishes she had asked more questions, and by grandchildren who speak anyway.
In the end, “what survives” is not simply the survivor. It is the relationship between the survivor’s inner world and the world that comes after: a relationship built from objects that refuse disposal, from art that refuses dehumanisation, and from voices that refuse silence.
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Editorial note
This essay was conducted as part of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2026 campaign: The Art of Remembrance, organised by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity (ENRS).