Memoir ~ Family History ~ Remembrance

Emily Sekler Breese is a nonfiction writer working in memoir, examining family history, inheritance, and the afterlife of historical and personal trauma. Her writing grows out of an effort to understand her grandmother’s death during the Holocaust and how that absence reverberates across generations. Through her recent long-form work, she explores memory, and writes toward truth, not only what is known, but what has been obscured, withheld, or forgotten. Her projects offer clarity, connection, and reckoning with difficult circumstances to tell stories that can become acts of witness and care.

NO MIRACLE CAME: A Granddaughter’s Letters Back to Her Grandmother Lost in Auschwitz is told through letters. It reaches across decades to explore loss, legacy, and the inheritance of trauma and resilience. Each letter becomes an act of discovery, and reclamation—of what history stole and what it left behind.

In the tense, narrowing years before Emilie Sekler and her husband, Hermann, were deported, Emilie’s letters survived. Hermann died in Theresienstadt; Emilie was later sent to Auschwitz, where she was murdered. The letters represent whispers from a world on the brink of disappearance. They prompted me to respond to the grandmother I never knew, documenting a family story shattered by history and asserting that her legacy—and my grandfather’s—will not be forgotten.

The correspondence becomes a bridge between generations, weaving research, imagination, and yearning into a portrait of trauma and love. My deeply personal replies reflect on experiences mirrored across generations—losing one’s treasured belongings, being forced into reduced quarters, and enduring Nazi-imposed degradations and stripping of dignity. Through this process,I piece together a granddaughter’s and grandmother’s shared personalities, dreams, and struggles. By engaging with her predicament and alongside my own life experiences, I uncover how her life continues to shape mine.

This blend of memoir, biography, and historical recovery will appeal to readers interested in intergenerational and family memoirs, those drawn to piecing together lost stories, and readers of Holocaust literature that illuminates lesser-told experiences beyond the canonical historical trauma.