The Writer’s Center welcomes writer Pauline Steinhorn for a reading from her new publication, Dreaming of the River. FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.
Pauline Steinhorn enjoys telling other people’s stories. Throughout her career as an award-winning filmmaker and writer, she has written and directed documentaries for PBS, Maryland Public Television, Sesame Street, Discovery Channel, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Smithsonian, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her articles and essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal and Moment magazine.
About Dreaming of the River
Bronia Feldman never imagined she would become the backbone of an underground medical lifeline, least of all inside the brutal forced-labor system of the HASAG munitions factory in occupied Poland. Torn from her family in September 1942, she arrives there shattered by grief. The only force strong enough to keep her alive is the chance to save others.
Left behind in the ghetto of Skarzysko-Kamienna are her husband and two young daughters. Her 13-year-old daughter, Hajuta, has been sent to a nearby labor site. Bronia seizes a rare opportunity to escape and manages to reach her daughter. After their brief reunion, she faces an impossible choice: flee into the forest to join the partisans or slip back to the place she has just escaped. When they are reunited months later, the moment is both miraculous and heartbreaking. Hajuta is no longer the girl Bronia remembers. Together they endure still darker days when they are deported to Bergen-Belsen in January 1945.
This true story of a Jewish mother and daughter is a testament to courage, devotion, and the fragile thread of hope that sustained them. Amid cruelty and terror, they also encounter moments of deep humanity and unimaginable courage. Throughout it all, both cling to memories of the River Kamienna, where they once danced, played music, and believed in a future. For Bronia and Hajuta, the river is more than a memory. It is a promise that one day they might return home.
Based on the journals of her mother and grandmother, Pauline Steinhorn’s Dreaming of the River tells how a woman and her daughter survived and saved others in brutal bomb-making slave labor camps and Bergen-Belsen through sabotage, daring escapes, and near-death rescues—often with the help of the most unlikely allies.
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