Not only life itself, but the fragile, stubborn forms through which life insists on meaning: language shaped by caution, objects guarded against loss, art created under threat, and memory carried forward by those born after catastrophe. In this conversation, Geraldine Shenkin reflects on her mother Marianne Grant’s survival of the Holocaust—not as a closed chapter of history, but as a living legacy embedded in everyday habits, sensory memory, artistic practice, and ethical responsibility. Speaking with Barbara Walshe, she traces how trauma is transmitted quietly across generations, how art becomes both refuge and evidence, and how remembrance survives not through abstraction, but through intimate acts of care, recognition, and speech.
Barbara Walshe: Geraldine, thank you for speaking with us. I’d like to begin with you, not with history. How are you and where is “home” for you?.
Geraldine: Home is Glasgow. I was born here, and I’ve never moved far—only about two miles from where I was born. I’m married, and I have two daughters, both married with children. One lives in London and one lives near me in Glasgow. I have five grandchildren—three boys and two girls. I feel very blessed.
Barbara: You’ve often said you grew up “a little bit different.” What did that difference feel like inside the house?
Geraldine: The common language between my parents and my grandmother was German. German was spoken in the house—and as a child, I loathed it. My mum later suggested I study German when I was sixteen so she could help me, and I did. But growing up, it made me feel different. Friends later said my parents had accents; to me, they were just Mum and Dad. Still, there were phrases said “the wrong way round,” and we were sent to elocution lessons early to make sure we pronounced English properly.
Barbara: The “difference” wasn’t only language, though. It sounds like the war lived in the everyday—quietly, but constantly.
Geraldine: Yes. My mother couldn’t throw anything out. Envelopes, letters—she’d write on every bit of paper, inside, outside, back of cards… Everything became a list, a note, something reused. I still have a birthday card with numbers written on it, and I show it to children in schools—because when you’ve had everything taken from you, nothing feels disposable. Nothing.
Barbara: So the house itself held a kind of memory—through objects.
Geraldine: Absolutely. Food too—nothing could be wasted. If we left food, she’d keep it for later, the next day. And she kept newspapers—there was a kitchen shelf packed underneath with papers piled high. Everything could be reused: lighting the fire, stuffing shoes, protecting bulbs in the garden. After she died in 2007, it took my siblings and me a year to clear the house.
Barbara: A year. That sounds like grief, but also archaeology—like you were excavating a life.
Geraldine: That’s exactly it. And in the loft we found her treasures. There was a trunk we were never allowed to open as children. That trunk is now on display in Glasgow at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. It came with her from Sweden after the war. Some paintings and drawings were kept hidden.
Barbara: Can I ask something sensitive? When did you truly begin to understand what your mother had been through?
Geraldine: It came out slowly. She didn’t want to burden us—she didn’t want to scare us. There were moments. I remember eating an egg once, and she told me how she had been given an egg by an SS soldier in Auschwitz after doing something—painting for him—and how she shared that egg among several people. She described it like diamonds. Stories like that appeared, but we didn’t ask too many questions.
Barbara: You said something striking: that as children you somehow knew not to ask.
Geraldine: Yes. I’ve spoken to other children of survivors and they say the same: there was a boundary. And I still wonder—why didn’t I ask? I’m the nosiest person in the world. But you just… didn’t.
Barbara: And yet some knowledge arrived anyway—sometimes with a physical cost. You spoke about gas.
Geraldine: I learned in my early teens that my mum had been in the gas chambers in Auschwitz three times. That haunted me. For years, I couldn’t go near a gas cooker. The smell of gas made me retch. I never had a gas cooker. Even food cooked on gas bothered me. And as a Jewish woman, you light Sabbath candles on Friday night—but I couldn’t strike a match at first. Fire… it was very hard. I did overcome it over time, but it affected me deeply.
Barbara: That’s an important point: the Holocaust isn’t only “history.” It becomes a bodily inheritance.
Geraldine: Yes. And not just that. My mum was so nervous, so unable to trust. She’d hide her handbag inside a plastic carrier bag so nobody would steal it. That total breakdown of trust… it shapes you. I’m a worrier. My daughters say I’m pessimistic—always thinking what could go wrong. I try not to be, but it’s there.
Barbara: And yet you also describe her as warm, friendly, intelligent—someone people loved. How do those two truths live together?
Geraldine: She was both. She was the friendliest, warmest, cleverest woman—ahead of her time. Her language skills were incredible. She could speak to anybody. Even in hospital, dying of cancer, in pain—she still had that sharp clarity. She told me, “Don’t be so daft. I’ll be dead by tomorrow.” And she was. She was right to the end.
Barbara: Let’s talk about what sustained her—and what she carried forward. Her art seems central. You’ve said it saved her life.
Geraldine: It did. Her talent—art and languages—saved her many times. She was first taken from Prague to Theresienstadt in 1942, and she spent about twenty months there. She worked in agriculture there and, in her spare time, did art and crafts with the children—trying to bring them something.
Barbara: This idea of bringing “something”—colour, perhaps—into a world built to erase colour.
Geraldine: Exactly. She always said she wanted to give children “a bit of colour in their lives.” Later, in Auschwitz, she decorated the children’s block. She painted Snow White, Bambi, Mickey Mouse, sunshine, mountains—lovely things. She said Auschwitz then wasn’t like it is now; there wasn’t a tree, no birds—just thick yellow mud. The murals were colour in a place without colour.
Barbara: You mentioned a friend who helped preserve her drawings—someone who literally carried her art forward.
Geraldine: Yes—Peter Urban. She gave him drawings and paintings to keep safely. That’s how they survived. And there’s a story from Theresienstadt: a starving little girl threw her shoe into an apple tree to get an apple down, the apple fell but the shoe got stuck. It was discovered. My mum used her language and charm and bravery to spare that girl a beating. The girl later grew up—Eva Urbanist—and she told me the story years ago, laughing.
Geraldine: Yes.
Barbara: You also spoke about your mother’s relationship to her own mother—your grandmother—especially around deportation.
Geraldine: In Theresienstadt my grandmother was put on the cattle wagon “to the East.” My mum managed to get her off the train three times—but then couldn’t get her off again. She couldn’t. The wagons stood there all day; they were filling them. Eventually my mum and grandmother were reunited later in Auschwitz, but it was horrific.
Barbara: I want to bring in another part of the story: your father. Often Holocaust narratives flatten families into a single “survivor story,” but yours is two histories meeting.
Geraldine: My father came to the UK at the end of 1938 or early 1939, from Königsberg, East Prussia. His family paid for him to come; someone had to sponsor him. He was a teenager. He never saw his parents or brother again. They were murdered. For years my parents thought they died in 1941, but I’ve only discovered in recent months they were rounded up in November 1943 in Berlin, among a group of just under 5,000.
Barbara: That late discovery—how does it land emotionally, decades later?
Geraldine: It shakes you. You think you know, and then you learn there were more years, more time, more waiting. The grief changes shape.
Barbara: Let’s move to a moment you described as profoundly emotional: returning to Prague with your mother in 1993. What happened when she stepped back into that city?
Geraldine: She became overwhelmed. She didn’t cry often, but at the airport she couldn’t hold back tears. We visited her father’s grave in the Jewish cemetery—enormous, with mausoleums. It took a long time to find the grave because ivy had grown over the stone. When we pulled it off, the writing was preserved.
Barbara: The ivy preserved the name. That’s such an image—nature covering, and also protecting.
Geraldine: Yes. Then we went to the apartment block where she grew up—beautiful flats in a good part of Prague near a park. My grandfather worked for the Bohemian Union Bank; the flats were for bank employees. My mum rang the bell, charmed the woman in Czech, and suddenly we were invited in.
Barbara: What did it feel like to walk into a home that was yours—and not yours?
Geraldine: It was emotional. I cried. My grandmother had described details—parquet floors, a gas heater on the wall—and it was exactly as she’d said. The woman who lived there was an architect and lived there with her son. We arrived without warning. I can’t imagine what she felt—a Jewish family turning up at the door of an apartment that had been taken. She likely felt shock, maybe awkwardness, maybe guilt—even if she hadn’t known the history.
Barbara: This raises a difficult question: what is “return” after dispossession? Is it closure, confrontation, or something else?
Geraldine: It’s all of it. It’s draining. It’s hard. But it mattered to my mother—to show us.
Barbara: I want to ask about how memory keeps “finding” you—sometimes through strangers. You spoke about a remarkable encounter at an IHRA event in Glasgow in 2024.
Geraldine: Yes. It was a conference with delegates from all over the world. I spoke at an event at Kelvingrove, after the Scottish First Minister. Two Slovak gentlemen came to me and said they had best wishes for me from a woman called Dita Kraus—who is known as the “Librarian of Auschwitz.”
Barbara: What did it mean to hear that name, out of nowhere?
Geraldine: I almost fell flat on the floor. My parents had been friends with Dita and her husband after the war. I didn’t even know she was still alive. She was turning 95 two weeks later. They put me in touch with her. We spoke on the phone, emailed—her English was excellent because she’d been an English teacher in Israel. She sent photographs of my mum and her together from earlier years.
Barbara: And you went to see her.
Geraldine: Yes. In March, I decided I had to go. I went with my niece. At first she didn’t feel well enough, but the next day I spent three hours with her. It was incredibly emotional. That’s where I learned so much about my mother and grandmother.
Barbara: What did she tell you that changed your understanding?
Geraldine: I learned that after liberation, Dita lived with my mum and grandmother in Bergen-Belsen. They arrived there ten days before liberation in April 1945. Dita was travelling in the same group with her mother, and after liberation they were put together. Dita’s mother was very ill. My mum arranged for her to go to hospital, but she died. My mum bought Dita a transport to Prague and promised she’d make sure her mother was buried properly—she did. They stayed lifelong friends.
Barbara: That’s extraordinary. It’s also a form of “legacy” we don’t always speak about: survival as responsibility for others.
Geraldine: Yes. My mum did that kind of thing. She had that strength.
Barbara: Another “memory finding you” moment was with Ella Weissenberger—connected to the Hansel and Gretel storybook. Tell me that story.
Geraldine: My mum created a hand-painted Hansel and Gretel storybook in Theresienstadt. For the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Ella Weissenberger came to Glasgow to speak. The day before, I met her at the Scottish Parliament. She didn’t recognise my mother’s name. I even mentioned my mum’s nickname, “Mausi”—because she was so skinny as a child, like a little mouse. Still no.
Barbara: And then?
Geraldine: The next day I went early to a museum café for a coffee. Ella walked in and sat next to me—unexpectedly. I had brought a catalogue book of my mum’s works—don’t ask me why, I just had a feeling. I opened it, turned pages, and when we reached the page showing four illustrations from the Hansel and Gretel storybook, her hand dug into me—she gripped me tightly. Under the table she pulled out a scroll: a photocopy of one of the drawings. She had been given it that morning by the museum because she recognised it—she had seen it before as a child. My mum had been creating that with her.
Barbara: That is… almost unbearable in its intimacy. The past reaches out through a child’s memory and touches you physically.
Geraldine: I couldn’t sleep for days.
Barbara: Geraldine, I want to ask about something ethically complicated. Your mother created beauty—murals for children—inside a place designed for murder. How do you hold that paradox?
Geraldine: She said the children were there only for a short time—three to six months—before they were taken to be gassed. She wanted to give them colour, something human. She got permission. And at the same time, she was also summoned to Mengele. She had to draw markings of children—twins—he had experimented on, and also “Gypsy family trees.” She said he never spoke, just marched in black shiny boots and pointed. She knew if she made an ink blot, she would be finished.
Barbara: And that connects to the book title—“Painting for My Life”.
Geraldine: Yes. And when I was writing the epilogue for the book with the Glasgow Museums curators, something hit me: Mengele was trying to wipe out Jews, doing experiments on twins… and I am a twin. My mother gave birth to twins. He failed. It’s ironical. It’s justice of a kind.
Barbara: When did your mother begin to speak publicly about the Holocaust? You suggest that happened after your father died. Why then?
Geraldine: My father died in December 1986, on the 23rd—his burial was on Christmas Eve. He was so loved that shops closed; it was an enormous funeral, with a police escort. About a year or two later, my mother began to speak publicly—first at a fundraising event. I think it was too painful for both my parents before that. My father had lost everyone. My mother lost 22 relatives. They carried too much grief. And also, in Britain, there wasn’t really public recognition for a long time. Holocaust Memorial Day changed that—the Britian became more aware, more willing to listen.
Barbara: Listening isn’t only a ritual, though—it’s a responsibility. You brought up antisemitism rising after 7 October, and how it echoes what your mother described from the early years of Nazi restrictions. How does that affect you now?
Geraldine: I’m Jewish first, and Scottish. I’ve had a protected life here, and I feel privileged. But I worry about the future. When antisemitism rises, it feels like history’s shadow lengthening again. I spoke in Scottish Parliament about how my mum told me Jews were banned from cinema, school—how life becomes restricted step by step.
Barbara: And yet you also carry your mother’s moral lesson—her insistence on the equal worth of people.
Geraldine: Yes. She taught that we are all human beings—flesh and blood—whatever colour, whatever background. She integrated with everyone. Neighbours weren’t all Jewish; we welcomed them. She believed people should love each other.
Barbara: Geraldine, let’s end where we began: what survives when everything is taken? I want to ask about your grandchildren. What do they know—what do they carry?
Geraldine: They know a lot. They talk about Mausi. They’re proud of her. I once found a roll of paper when clearing the house—part of the frieze she practised for Yad Vashem, remembering the colours. It had Mickey Mouse, Snow White, toadstools—you could see pencil marks behind the paint. I framed it and gave it to my eldest granddaughter when she was about six. It hangs in her bedroom. And my younger granddaughter—Freya, she’s ten now—spoke at her school last year for Holocaust Memorial Day. It’s not a Jewish school. The rabbi came to listen. She wrote and delivered a speech herself about her great-grandmother. She was nine. These children were born long after my mum died—and yet it’s still going on.
Barbara: That is legacy in the deepest sense—not nostalgia, not biography, but a living transmission. If you could say one thing your mother would want future generations to understand, what would it be?
Geraldine: That it must be taught—for decades ahead. She wanted everyone to learn what happened. And I’m proud—proud of her, proud that her story continues through the art, through the museum, through the book, and through the children.
Barbara: And what do you wish for yourself, inside this legacy?
Geraldine: I wish I had asked more questions when I was younger. But I’m grateful we made the book—because it holds the whole story. And I’m grateful that people want to listen, and that her story can reach further.
Barbara: Geraldine, thank you. Your mother’s art survived the camps—and you’ve helped it survive time. That is a different kind of courage.
Geraldine: Thank you. I’m trying. I’m trying to keep her alive.
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Editorial note
This interview 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).