Olivia Newman honors her mother’s family, many of whom were killed in pogroms in Russia. Olivia was an adult before she began to discover the story of the Griliches family. In her book, I Heard the Sound of Silence, Are We Related, she writes, “She (Olivia’s mother) was born into a Jewish family in Lithuania before the turn of the century, (and) had several siblings; the oldest sister was eighteen years older than she and got married in that country, as did a second sister….Her parents had come from Vilna and those surrounding shtetls, but had moved a lot, had stayed for a while in Memel/Klaipeda, in Tilsit, as well as in some east Prussian cities.” As an adult, Olivia rediscovered her mother’s journal, and was able to learn more about her family’s history.
The Nashville Holocaust Memorial