Terry Mandel is the daughter of Ingelore Silberbach, a refugee from the Holocaust. Born in Cologne, Ingelore attended the Königin-Luise-Schule before she was expelled under Nazi persecution for being Jewish. In 1938, her family managed to escape to the United States, where Terry later grew up.

For most of her life, Terry believed her mother’s account that their family had survived the Nazi era without loss. Only decades after her mother’s death did she begin to uncover a more complex and painful history. Contacted by a student researching at her mother’s former school, Terry was prompted to look more closely into her family’s past – revealing that not all of her relatives had escaped persecution.

In this interview, Terry Mandel reflects on this process of "Unerasure" – the act of recovering erased histories and piecing together a fragmented family narrative. She also shares the particular perspective she brings as a descendant, navigating the legacy of survival, loss, and remembrance. Against this background, she also addresses contemporary societal debates, including the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Drawing on her family history, she reflects on questions of memory, responsibility, and the complexities of discussing violence, identity, and solidarity in the present.

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. It was conducted in Cologne in December 2025.

Growing up with a Jewish-German mother, grandparents, and aunt, I was always very curious about their lives before they came to the United States. 

But I really got very little of that story. It was clearly very uncomfortable, and it was kind of confusing because my mother told me, "Everybody got out, no one in our family was murdered in the Holocaust." And something in me was just like: That didn't sound right, didn't feel right – long before I even studied the Holocaust at school. Something about how she said it and her unwillingness to talk about anything never sat right with me. It was clear that it was a very, very uncomfortable topic. There were some funny stories and some anecdotes, but I knew very little. 

25 years after my mother passed, I get an email out of the blue late one night through ancestry.com.

It was from a 16-year-old student named Anna at Königin-Luise-Schule in Köln, which meant absolutely nothing to me. She said that in her special history class that they were studying the lives and fates of Jewish girls who had attended Königin-Louise-Schule during the Nazi era. And her subject? She found the name of her subject, Ingelore Silberbach, on an unpublished family tree on Ancestry. And would I please make it public so she could do her assignment? Oh, and by the way, maybe I would be willing to tell her how I was connected to this family.

She had no idea that Ingelore Silberbach was my mother. 

This was just a completely astonishing thing to have happened out of the blue like this so late in my life. So I immediately wrote her back and just said, "You just hit the jackpot," essentially. "When can we talk? What do you need? How can I help you? I would be very happy." So we had a Zoom call a couple of days later, and she wanted photographs and documents and a timeline of my mother's life after the family left in November of 1938. She wanted to know as much as she could about parts of my mother's life that she didn't know anything about and that I knew something about, but in fact she had a lot of secrets in her possession or in her research area.

We formed this intergenerational, intercultural examination together.

And it really became everything that I focused on. Quickly there were stories that began to emerge from Anna looking at the photographs I put on an internet photo album. I put them in order and labeled them with what I thought they were. Immediately she started coming back saying, 'Oh my goodness, my classmate got that exact same photograph of your mother and her friend at Königsforst from the daughter of your mother's best friend. I'm like, "Wow. How did you know she was her best friend?" – “Oh, we can see her message on the first page of the poesie album, which is reserved for the best friend.”

It just began opening up. And "Oh no, that picture isn't what you think it is because your mother was expelled from school. That's not her graduation photo from Königin-Louise-Schule." So on and on, every week there were new revelations for me and for her as well. So that's how it began, July of 2021.

Of course I knew that they had been forced to flee.

I could feel the weight of that. But it just wasn't discussed at all. The identity shift for me came over time. It was exciting at the very beginning just to start getting some details about my mother's life and have it be more specific and not so vague. That was quite helpful. But what's happened since then and continues to happen is the thing that I think keeps changing and shifting my identity. And actually, while I'm getting answers to many questions, there's many, many more questions now. And unfortunately, there's no one left alive to be able to have those conversations with. 

It's like a 1,000-piece puzzle, and I started out with 376 pieces with no finished picture, and now I might have 792, but I'm never going to have 1,000 pieces. 

I will never have the complete picture of what their lives were like or why they made the decisions and the choices they made. I have since learned that for that generation of Jews, as well as of Germans, that is par for the course. It doesn't make it better, but it gives me a broader understanding. I believe, but don't know, that the conscious motivation was, "It's better if they don't know." That it was done consciously as a protective measure, "That our children and grandchildren have no reason to have to know about this suffering. Let's just live in the now and not dwell on the past." I believe that's the conscious motivation. I believe also that there's an unconscious motivation which also protects them from reliving this trauma. And because of all we know now in cognitive science about intergenerational trauma, there was really zero understanding of that when I was born in the '50s. I would say that most people in the world still don't know about this, but having been a cognitive scientist early in my career, I've been following this quite closely. I believe that they really thought that not talking about it would let this past be buried. They had no appreciation for how they carried their trauma. 

Bearing it was not a way of healing it.

They didn't understand that descendants carry this genetically as well as through the silence. There's more knowledge now, and I was always different from my family, always very interested in shedding light on things that were kept in the dark. That's my personality, always has been. Nothing has changed about that except that now I have more to work with. I can pursue this now. Because Anna sent me an email from 6,000 miles, and a couple of generations, away, and we began this incredible exchange. 

Obviously the first seed of something I had no concept of beforehand came from Anna's email and the Projektkurs Geschichte class she was taking from Dirk Erkelenz at Königin-Luise-Schule. But it got planted and then it sat there for a while. Anna told me that – with our permission – at the end of our research project the school would like to lay a Stolperstein in their courtyard. They already had a collection of stones honouring other former students whom the present-day students in the Projektkurs had studied. And I said, "Of course, that would be wonderful."

It was the first time I’d understood that it was possible to lay Stolpersteine for people who had survived. 

I thought maybe I had gotten it wrong. But I went back and realised that, at the beginning of Gunter Deming's wonderful project, it was only for people who had been murdered; it didn't initially include people who were persecuted but were able to flee. I thought it would be very strange for my mother to have a Stolperstein at the school but that the rest of my family, her sister, her parents and grandmother would not have stones for them. And so I began the process with NS Dok [NS Dokumentationszentrum der Stadt Köln]. I asked my sister and cousin first if they would agree to this. It wasn't certainly my own personal decision alone. They said, "Yes, that would be fine." And we began that process in September 2021. In May 2022 we found out that we were on the list for October 2022.

The first time I ever was in Köln was for that Stolpersteinverlegung in front of my family's villa, which still stands in Marienburg. I had seen photographs of this from my aunt who had visited with her two sons and daughter in law in 1991. The villa had been cut up into flats and they had rung the bell. Someone wasn't home, someone said no, and a student who lived on the top floor which is – I learned later – where my aunt and mother lived with their Kinderfräulein, they were able to go up and see the flat.

So I had these pictures of this very old-looking building that had not been well cared for and was quite shocked to learn, the day before I arrived in Köln, that this building had been purchased twenty years earlier and been completely restored.

A week before Stolpersteine are laid – at least in Köln – a letter goes out from the organizing body, again in Köln it's NS Dok, just to let them know that this is taking place on the public sidewalk. There is no possibility for people to object. This was one of Gunter Deming's brilliant ideas about how to do this kind of memorialisation: No one's permission was required except for the Stadt. 

Someone who has become a very dear friend but whom I didn't know then except for a few email exchanges, Rita von Schwartzenberg, had asked NS Dok to include her name and number on the letter that they'd sent to the owners so that they could contact her. So they get this letter from the Stadt and the owner calls my friend Rita and says, “There's some mistake, there has been a mistake.' And she said, 'Well, what do you mean?”

And he said, “Well, maybe the Silberbachs live somewhere nearby, but surely they didn't live in this house.”

And she said, "Why do you say that?" He said, "Well, when we bought the house twenty years ago, the grandson of the architect and an elderly neighbor gave us the names of every owner and there were never any Silberbachs who owned the house." And she responded,"'I am quite sure that Stadt Köln would not allow Stolpersteine to be laid unless they had proof. But I didn't do the research, Ibrahim Basalamah at NS Dok did. I would suggest that you call him." So the owner calls Ibrahim and two hours later calls back and says, 

“Oh my god I had no idea.”

Because the evidence was in the original red leather bound Adressbuch from 1918 to 1938. My great-grandfather and grandfather owned this property until it was stolen by the Nazis. So at that point he invited us if we wanted to come for tea.

This is another piece of the Unerasure.

Because all of a sudden here is the big erasure. And of course these awarenesses came in spurts over time, it wasn't some grand moment where I saw the whole thing. 

The first day that I was in Köln I went as a guest to the home my mother and aunt grew up in. And it was quite astonishing. It was just an incredible experience. One of the things that happened there was because of Rita. I had told her that my cousin Vernon Katz had written a beautiful memoir, Der blaue Salon, in English first and then it was more recently translated into German. He was not from Köln, he was from NRW but more in the countryside near Bad Salzuflen. Rita had gotten the book and read it before I arrived. And as we were sitting in the kitchen of this beautiful villa she asked the owners, "Would you mind if I read a short passage from Terry's cousin's memoir?" They agreed.

And she starts reading a description of the room we're sitting in. 

My cousin Vernon – he was maybe 8, 9, 10 years old, no older than that – had an extraordinary memory for these details, because coming to visit this grand villa of his favorite Tante, my grandmother, was very memorable for him. He describes this grand opening between the kitchen and the salon. And that there were these glass doors that connected these two rooms or shut the rooms off. And I could see the owners, one was to my left, one was to my right, and out of the corners of my eyes I could see their jaws drop at the same moment.

They both stood up and went to either side of this huge opening. There were no doors visible, and then they slowly pulled these hidden glass doors closed. I know that in that moment, all of us had all the hair on our arms standing up – even now when I tell it I have the same reaction, people who are hearing this story usually do – but we all just sat there in total shock at this precise description. It's hard to explain the feeling of this. 

For them it was really the proof – they had still been somewhat skeptical. 

I learned later they’d asked Rita if I had any photographs of the house. I mean, fleeing in the middle of the night people don't typically grab a lot of photographs with them. They did take a few, but nothing of the house. 

The second day I was in Cologne I met Anna face to face for the first time. We went to visit the Jawne, which – I had learned from her – is where my mother had gone to school after she and the rest of the Jewish students got expelled. They were in the last class of Jewish students in Cologne to be expelled, at Easter 1938. And so we went to the Jawne, which is no longer a school but a research and education center. I brought my mother’s poesie album. My sister had agreed that we could donate this. For them it was this extraordinary historical document because they could verify the names of many of the students in that class. And there was the signature of a very popular teacher whom Adrian Stellmacher, the curator, had interviewed in England many years earlier.

The next day, I spoke at Liebfrauenschule, a Catholic school, by a teacher who had been a docent at the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam. We had been connected through a German-American exchange organisation for peace. It was a possibility for these students to understand how they could go deeper in their government-required Holocaust education, into really making contact, if not with a survivor but with a descendant of a survivor. They asked me at least a dozen questions, "Have you ever experienced antisemitism since you have been in Germany?" – I look at my watch and say, "I have been here for like 48 hours and I have been surrounded by wonderful Germans and friends. But of course, it is happening everywhere."

And I threw up a slide of Donald Trump.

This was October 2022, so before the most recent U.S. election, I realized I might really get in trouble because I had not previewed any of this with the teachers. I said to the students, "I hope this does not offend any of you. Your parents may think Donald Trump is a really cool guy, but I can tell you that he is a proto-fascist. And one thing I would really encourage you to do is, begin to get your tentacles up and recognize these things early on." This was more than two years before he was elected again. I said, "I only have one question for you:

What do you know about your family's situation during the war?"

Forty 16- and 17-year-olds, right before lunch, are usually not so quiet – but in that room, you could hear a pin drop. One girl jumps up, waving her hand, "My grandfather was a Socialist and he told us all these stories…" And the more she filled with this completely understandable pride, her classmates were folding over looking at the floor and waiting for the floor to open up. I just kept quiet. I did not ask again. I knew that something would come. And finally, after a very long silence, a young – maybe 16-year-old boy – says very quietly,

"We do not know anything." And I bent down and looked at him and said, “Well, then we are the same.”

Now, everybody was sitting straight up, eyes wide. "What do you mean?" If you could feel an inflection point in your body and in your life, it was that moment. 

Their response suggested to me that they’d believed that anybody who survived the Holocaust would just talk trash about Germans and Germany everyday of their lives. And why then was I here? Here I was, friendly, warm. They could not understand it. And the next thing that I realized I said to them was, "You know, I was invited here as a descendant, to talk to you about my family. 

But actually everyone in this room is a descendant of something.

Terrible things, wonderful things but most of us don't know anything about it." That was my experience as well. And what Anna gave me was an opportunity to know more about my family story. And I said, “I really wish that for you as well. Because as painful as knowing some of these things is, I feel so much lighter knowing what I know. And I want you to have that opportunity and that experience as well.”

It was just this beautiful exchange and that's the moment my next step in life really began, for sure. When I still had no idea what it would be, I had no name for anything. I know that those seeds started getting watered – at that moment.

Fast forward, I went home in November and what I left Germany with was this thing that was stuck with me was this word "erasure" and this feeling of erasure in my throat. And it was clear that some of it was unintentional, some of it was definitely intentional. Did it matter? I could not make this distinction with certainty in any case. And late November, the words came to my head, The UNERASURE Projekt. I knew it had to start with young people and I knew it had to do with education.

Even though my home is in the United States, where our not-for-profit is based, it felt important to me to bring the work to Germany, where this all started. It continues to become more clear to me over time. We design and deliver experiential learning programs that spark reflection, dialogue, and engagement in schools, cultural institutions, government agencies, business, and society.

There is a lot of continuing connection between descendants.

As the survivors are less and less available and able to speak to their firsthand experience – or are unwilling, like my mother – it’s very important for those of us who are willing and able to continue to share that because we live with it. It is central to our work that we all live with these histories even if we did not ourselves live through them.

It seems very clear to me that the world right now shows what it looks like when you don't do that healing. We cannot afford to be complacent and say, "Well, that was so long ago. I didn't have that experience. It's not mine to talk about." Everybody has a choice. That is something that I emphasize in all of my workshops, that you always have a choice.

But understand, choosing not to act is also a choice.

Choosing to be silent, choosing to be not curious, choosing to take democracy for granted. All of those things are choices. And while second, third, and fourth generation Germans have, in my view, zero responsibility for what happened during the Reich, we all have have 100% responsibility for how we choose to live in the world now and create the world that for the next generations. There's no prescription on my part for what that should look like. But at least I want to open up the opportunity for our workshop participants to reflect. Which is why we do experiential rather than didactic programs.

I'm not a Holocaust educator.

I have no interest in giving them facts or asking them to tell me back what they heard. What I do is I tell a short family story to give them an opportunity where they get to speak for a couple of minutes with no cross talk, reflecting on whatever that question or whatever this sparked for them. And this also works remarkably well with people who have no German background, who are immigrants to this country themselves or people with migrant backgrounds, but who come from places and have families where there also was suffering. So I'm quick to tell people: Look in all of our histories. I believe in everyone’s past, there were victims, survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators. If we were able to really go back through our entire lineages, we would find some of all of that. And we carry that.

So the question is: How much do you want to shine a light into that darkness?

Maybe for your own good or your own family, but maybe it's you're curious about your community, maybe you're curious about how the world could be a better place than it is now, a safer place, a more respectful place where people are not othered. Whether it's Jews or Muslims or gay people or disabled people. And if my taking the time, spending now half my life in Germany is a way to really begin that conversation among young people who are of course always the future, then that to me seems like the best legacy I can leave. Something very important got started with Anna. I believe this helps answer the perennial question which is now a big thing in Germany:

Why do we have to deal with this ancient history? Why do we have to carry this?

Well, first of all, I'm not asking you to. I don't blame you for this. Whether you, your family members were SS officers or unfortunate bystanders or not from Germany at all, you bear no responsibility for what they did.

But you bear all the responsibility for what you choose now.

That is up to you. And that is very much in the present that has nothing to do with ancient history. All of our work is trying to help build a bridge between these hidden stories, the past and the present, and between people with very different backgrounds. What does that mean to us in the present? That's my key question.

In Germany, there's a high priority on integration and taking on the Shoah, the Holocaust, as part of your own identity.

I believe it's unreasonable to ask people who have come through their own tremendous suffering, who may have grown up in places where they were taught to hate Jews, and who may have mistakenly conflated all Jews with Israeli politics.

Someone needs to be interested in their stories, in their suffering, and help them then begin to, in their own experience, build a bridge between this and the persecution that happened during the Nazi Zeit. We're all descendants. And we all carry the weight of things we often don't know much about or that we're not allowed to talk about or we're afraid to talk about. A lot of what we intend to do with The unERASURE Projekt is to give people an opportunity to be curious about that. Again, I'm not trying to give answers. We are trying to create opportunities for young people to find a way to engage that's meaningful for them. 

I can offer them many possibilities, but I have no idea what will make the difference for a particular student, whether it's through the arts or the kind of essay that Anna wrote and the research she did. There are kids already all throughout Germany and the world who are doing these kinds of projects, even very young in the schools, in the lower grades. It's great to read and work with Anne Frank's diary, but I'm really excited about having people find and share more stories about people lost to history.

Every life deserves that kind of respect and honoring.

If anything, what we're trying to do with The unERASURE Projekt is really to help people find that identity, that baseline identity that is not their gender, their religion, their sexual orientation, their size, their country of origin, their anything, what they prefer to eat for dinner or what they're allergic to.

To identify, really, as a human being who wants to live in a world of dignity and respect for humans and the environment. That's really where it comes down to me. And I think that descendants of people who were persecuted and murdered and descendants of people who have grandparents and great grandparents who were perpetrators and descendants of people who saved others, all of us have something that we can bring to our present moment that makes a contribution to the world. Sadly, we now have all the evidence we need of what the world looks like when we don't take care.

Let's take on the opportunity to create a world where we do care and where one person can really make a huge, huge, huge difference.

I asked grade five students, “What could you do that doesn't require anybody's permission, not from your teacher, your parents, your priest, your pastor, the government? I'm asking you to just think about what you could do to create more of the world that you've just told me that you want to live in.”

They raised their hands immediately. "Well, when I see somebody eating alone, I could go eat with them." – “When my friend whose family moved here from Syria is feeling sad, then I could go and maybe we could just spend some time together, try to do something fun.”

They had a ton of ideas when they were given just the thought experiment.

What could you do? Where's your power to choose for yourself? 

Not defiance, just clarity. Even at grade five, they know exactly what they can do. How to be good people. That makes me want to get up every morning and keep doing more of the same!