Listening  is  an  act  greater  than  not  talking, which is itself a great act. In my grandma’s apartment, I pressed my lips together and took in her world (pillboxes and photos albums, pickle jars turned soup containers) and tried to forget my own (email drafts and unread texts, my phone, always my phone). My sight changed when I listened and when I listened closely enough, there was a factory in my grandma’s living room. There were prisoners in drab gray clothes, their bare hands wrapped around half-filled grenades. Three miles away was a camp with wooden bunks, a basement kitchen. She was there looking here, wondering when she’d see her sister again. I was here looking there, wondering why I knew so little about the past.

After I sat with my grandma, I knew more. I knew my grandma Golda Indig, who was there the night I was born, who nestled me in her arms while an ambulance was called, who cleaned the car afterwards until it looked close to normal, had been in three Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust. I knew she spent the majority of her imprisonment in a forced labor camp where she wasn’t on the official roll. I knew she had to hide from the SS because of this, hide under bunks and behind buildings. I knew she snuck into the kitchen one day to ask the prisoners there if she could help them peel potatoes. I knew they said yes. I knew she turned fourteen in this forced labor camp, hidden in a forest, far from home.

I didn’t know the name of the camp.

She  had  said  it,  but  I  couldn’t  make  it  out,  couldn’t  spell  it.  The  name sounded like Heshnestadt. Or Kitchenstadt? It was a German word and my grandma’s pronunciation came with a heavy Hungarian accent. I wanted to get it right and so, I made a list of everything I knew:

The name ended in –stadt. That part I heard.

Some prisoners, if not all, were women.

Some, if not all, came from Auschwitz.

There was a kitchen where prisoners made soup. Golda was one of them.

There was a factory outside the camp where prisoners made munitions. Her sister Blimchu was one.

That was it. That was all I knew. But how could I not know? How could I let this name, this piece of history, of our history, slip away? I had no choice. I had to find it.

And so, the wild goose chase was on.

Research is an act more complicated than reading, which can be done standing on a bus or a train. With research, a person must sit. They must be patient. They must not leap to conclusions, even if they are outstanding at leaping.

I found a list online and allowed myself a small leap. It was a list of the major Nazi concentration camps during World War II and only one name ended with –stadt. Terezin, I read, was a ghetto-labor camp roughly forty miles outside Prague. It was also known as Theresienstadt. Could this be the wild goose?

Women were imprisoned at Theresienstadt. The  camp  had  kitchens, too,  although  descriptions  of  fresh-baked  bread  didn’t  quite  match  Golda’s recollections of watery soup every night. Maybe she forgot? She often called me by my cousins’ names until she could come up with mine, so it seemed possible. But I kept discovering more: families managed to stay together at Theresienstadt? And there were soccer fields? The camp, I learned, served partly as a model ghetto for Nazi propaganda and partly as a holding pen until people could be moved (and for the most part, murdered) elsewhere. In the meantime, prisoners were allowed more of a cultural life there than at any other camp. There was a library, school, even musical performances. I was fascinated, but confused. Where was the arms factory?

On YouTube, I found it.

In 2013, Glen Emery filmed a series of motorcycle rides outside the camp, posting them to his channel Prague Moto Vlog. In one, Emery navigates a narrow road, passes a dog training center, parks his bike, grumbles about its weight and hikes through a muddy forest until reaching a large metal door in the side of a hill.

There, on the screen of my laptop, shrouded by crumpled leaves and thick moss, was the entrance to the factory I’d been looking for. I stared at the rusted- over door. “What a horrible place, man,” Emery says as he inches closer. “Zakaz vstupu, forbidden entrance. I’ll say. Man, this a scary place.”

Two miles outside of Theresienstadt, in a town called Litomerice, the Nazis turned an abandoned limestone mine into a military manufacturing site.

Forced laborers excavated the stone, leaving behind a labyrinth of underground production halls. From a standard mine, they created three covert arms factories stretching nearly eighteen miles underneath the Czech Uplands.

So, Thereseinstadt? This must be the wild goose. Still, something didn’t sit right with me. I kept searching for that one definitive detail. What I found was that prisoners made parts for engines at Litomerice, not munitions. Many, if not all, were men. I had recorded my initial conversation with my grandma and played it back to hear her pronunciation. I felt even more uncertain.

Online I found another list. This one, from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), didn’t outline the major concentration camps, but gave them all, every ghetto, forced labor and death camp in Nazi Germany. Called the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, the list was broken into multiple volumes. Why not one, I wondered. Why does everything have to be so complicated? So difficult?

This was why: from 1933 to 1945, there were more than 44,000 camps and ghettos across Europe. The number sat in my stomach like gum. I looked back at all those zeroes, that comma, and downloaded the two PDFs. My fingers went on autopilot: file-find s-t-a-d-t. In the first PDF, –stadt was found 922 times. In the second, 738 times. Theresienstadt, it turned out, did not stand alone.

I knew the soccer fields sounded wrong.

I read every mention of the word –stadt. I learned about the prisoners at Duderstadt, forced to produce 30- and 40mm shells near Hannover, and “Kommando Köln-stadt,” a group of Soviet prisoners ordered to clear rubble from Cologne. I learned about Deborah E. Lipstadt, a member of the Academic Committee of the US Holocaust Memorial Council who happened to have the letters s-t-a-d-t in her name.

But what I really learned was how much horror had been carried out. How much suffering people like (and not like) my grandma had endured. Starvation, separation, imprisonment, enslavement, typhus, torment, bullets, gas. I felt like finding a sled and pushing myself down a long, steep hill.

I turned away from the project and saw circles in the news. I saw patterns repeating, new generations being targeted and scarred. Brown bodies in silver blankets. Fencing for cages. Black necks, choked. Shootings in temples and mosques. Pipelines, poor water. Violent rhetoric, tiki torch flames. Researching my grandma’s story had fine-tuned my ability to spot persecution and prejudice, and it was all around me. It always had been. I felt ill. Where was my phone?

Persistence is an act greater than not giving up. It is the active choice to continue, made again and again and again. I did not persist. Or I did, but it was an accident. A stroke of luck.

On the USHMM website, I discovered a way to request records on a particular Holocaust survivor. Priority went to family members. I filled out the  form,  then  forgot  all  about  it,  assuming  there’d  be  nothing.  There  had never been anything before. No one in my family had any documentation, any formal records. Months later, I received an email. A research team had run my request through the Arolsen Archives, an online database with documents on millions of victims of Nazi persecution. For the first time, I saw the ship manifest that marked my family’s entry to North America. I saw the paperwork that made their passage possible, the stamps sealing their fate. I discovered inquiry cards from 1956, the first requests my family made for information and restitution. Golda Indig, one card said, was held at the following camps: Auschwitz, Kürzenstadt, Bergen-Belsen.

The wild goose.

I emailed the researchers back. What more can you tell me about Kürzenstadt?

They emailed me back. Nothing, it doesn’t exist.

The research team looked through all their sources and found no camps, towns or regions in Europe with the name Kürzenstadt. As far as they could tell, the name existed in one place only: an inquiry someone submitted on my grandma’s behalf. In other words, the name came from someone like me, someone trying to figure out how to spell this damn thing.

Once I started laughing, it was hard to stop.

Patience is an act greater than waiting. You must lie in your house and wait, yes, but you must also crack the windows open. Not so much you’ll be blown away in the day’s news, but enough for new ideas to slip in. It was through one of these windows that a name came to me. Blimchu Milszstein, the great-aunt I never met, the sister who endured the same wooden barracks and daily death threats as my grandma. I submitted a request for Blimchu’s records and waited.

When I had first set out to document my grandma’s story, it had been at her request (and my oblivion). Now, the mission was all mine. I spent hours combing through historical documents, inhaling testimonies from other survivors, translating Czech, Polish, and German websites just so I could find the name of this camp. Something in me cracked open. I needed to know what happened. I needed to understand the history that had shaped my family in a thousand invisible ways. We were who we were because she had been where she’d been.

The email came on a Thursday. The sisters, it said, were at a women’s- only labor camp in Krzystkowice, Poland. In German, the town was known as Christianstadt.

Christianstadt held between one and two thousand prisoners, a speck in the history books. Its prisoners—all Jewish, all women—came from far and wide: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland. They were forced to work at a munitions factory run by Dynamit AG Nobel, a German chemical company still in operation today. The factory was a three-mile walk from the women’s barracks.

At the factory, prisoners filled grenades with their bare hands, coming into regular contact with toxic substances. Many suffered from seizures, burns, and poisoning. At the end of their shifts, they made the same three-mile trek back to the camp where they received a bowl of soup, their one meal for the day.

The details matched my grandma’s memories perfectly: female prisoners, bowls of soup, a munitions factory a long walk away. They made bombs there, not engines. Even a story she told me about a Hungarian prisoner delivering a stillborn baby was there in the historical record. I’d found the wild goose.

I told my grandma the name of the camp and she replied, “Yeah.” She had never any doubt to what she was saying. I, on the other hand, was still learning how to listen, how to research, persist, be patient. I was still learning about the war, how it stayed with a person, with their body, how it got passed down. In her essay “Writing Advice for My Younger Self,” E.J. Koh says, “To research is to rehabilitate . . . words cannot only heal previous generations, they can reverse the trajectory of damage into future generations.” Ah, I thought, her words filling my ears. So that was what I was doing, that was why I had become so obsessed. I was rehabilitating a broken story, mending an old familial wound. I’d been to physical therapy enough times to know the process: strengthen that which is weak, stretch that which is tight. Searching for the name of this camp, one of 44,000, strengthened my sense of the past and stretched my view of myself. I was not so disconnected, not so incapable. In my search, I found a new kind of dexterity, a way to hold the trauma and the truth, a way to see it and set it down. We can find repair, you, me, my grandma, her story; we can be something more than resilient.

Brooke Randel is a writer and copywriter in Chicago. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published or is forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Jewish Fiction, the Nasiona, SmokeLong Quarterly, Stymie Magazine and Two Cities Review. She is a reader for Chestnut Review. She is currently writing a memoir about her grandma, literacy, and the legacy of the Holocaust. Find more of her work at brookerandel.com.

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