"in July, 1983-thirty-seven years after having left-I returned to Poland with my mother on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the varshever geto oyfshtand, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Though I had been raised in almost a khurbn kultur, a Holocaust culture, I was totally unprepared for the experience. In Poland I saw the shadows of Jewish-Polish culture and was able to infer from them the magnitude of what had taken place. It was like stepping into a negative rather than a photograph. I was overcome by the sudden realization of the scale of the loss."