Much like Ciara, Alanis Morissette also has ancestors who endured the unspeakable.
Her mother, Georgia Feuerstein, was born in Hungary to parents who had survived the Holocaust, an experience so traumatic that the family actually kept its Jewish heritage a secret.
I think I found out that I was Jewish in my late twenties.
- Really?
- I didn't know, yeah.
Why do you think that no one told you?
I think there was a terror that is in their bones, and they were being protective of us and just not wanting antisemitism, and so they were doing it to protect us, sort of keeping us in the dark around it.
The logic of this decision is hard to debate.
Hungary's persecution of its Jewish population dates back to the Middle Ages, but in the 20th century, it entered a terrifying new phase.
When World War II broke out, Hungary was allied with Nazi Germany.
Many Jewish men were forced into what were called work battalions and were ultimately sent to the Russian front, essentially as slave labor.
Alanis's grandfather, Imre Feuerstein, somehow managed to avoid this fate, but his two brothers, Gyorgy and Sndor, weren't so lucky.
Alanis's relatives believed that both men were forced into one of the work battalions.
A memoir written by a battalion member gives a sense of what they endured.
"As soon as our two wagons arrived packed with entirely broken people, the guards started to beat them.
They threw the helpless patients from the wagons, made them line up with us, and left us standing there for hours.
This was followed by organized looting.
They took almost everything we still had left and chased us up the already crowded, lice-infested barn.
The treatment and the food were so horrible, however, that typhoid fever, dysentery, and the brutality of the guards killed our comrades one after the other."
- Wow.
- You could see photos of men in the labor services on your left there.
Alanis, this happened to your grandfather's brothers, your mother's uncles.
Yeah, I'm horrified at the thought that at the thought of that, and having gone there a couple of times and hearing stories from my mother sitting right next to her in the home she grew up in.
It's just... it's unfathomable for me.
The men who survived the work battalions returned home to be confronted by a new terror.
In March of 1944, Nazi Germany took control of Hungary.
By war's end, more than half of the country's Jewish population had perished, over 500,000 people.
Alanis's family believed that Imre's brothers were among the victims, but they had no idea what had actually happened to them.
And in the archives of the Red Cross, we saw that Imre himself made inquiries after the war, hoping that his brother Gyorgy might somehow still be alive.
So he was looking for him?
He was looking for him.
Oh.
In 1949, 4 years after World War II ended, your grandfather asked the Red Cross to look for his brother.
Did you know this?
I did not know this.
Can you imagine what that was like for your grandfather, carrying that burden?
Not knowing where your sibling is, if they're alive or dead?
Yeah, having no closure, - no finality.
- Yeah.
No, God.
As it turns out, Imre's efforts to find his brother were doomed from the start.
In Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, we found testimonials that were submitted on behalf of Gyorgy and Sndor by a woman who knew them both.
Testimonials of this kind are considered to be symbolic tombstones for people whose deaths were not documented during the Holocaust.
Would you please read the transcribed sections, - Yes.
- starting on your left?
"Family name, Feuerstein.
First name, Gyorgy.
Circumstances of death: he was in the slave labor army sent to Russia.
Family name: Feuerstein.
First name: Sndor.
Circumstances of death: he was in the slave labor army sent to Russia."
Wow.
Have you ever seen those before?
No.
Wow.
I mean, it's one thing to have a family rumor that they disappeared, but now we know why they disappeared.
Yeah, no, my mother and my grandmother, we didn't get into this.
Will you tell your kids this story?
- Oh, yes, yeah.
- Yeah.
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