For the children and grandchildren of those lost in the Holocaust, there is often a silence that cuts close to home—not an absence of history in general, but of their own family’s story in particular. It is a silence that Simon Bergson knows well: he has no access to his grandparents’ history and nothing of his great-grandparents’ lives to pass on.
That absence has given him a keen sense of what his own memoir means. The story he has recorded—of a father who dreamed of New York and of a life that came to embody the American Dream—will be there for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren whenever they want it. In this interview, he reflects on a process that he found easier than he had anticipated and on what it means to leave behind a record that will endure for generations.
Simon’s LifeBook, Without a Plan, was completed in 2025.
