Julie Brill’s memoir Hidden in Plain Sight: A Family Memoir and the Untold Story of the Holocaust in Serbia explores a little-known chapter of Holocaust history while examining the challenges of motherhood across generations. The book documents the destruction of Belgrade’s Jewish community, where 90% of 10,000 Jews perished within 12 months of Nazi occupation.
Brill’s father, born in 1938, survived the Holocaust as a young child. His memories—of his father doing forced labor while living at home, of his mother delivering food to her imprisoned husband—diverged sharply from well-known Holocaust narratives. These recollections became the cornerstone of Brill’s investigation into her family’s past.
Brill writes from multiple vantage points: as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor and as the mother of two daughters, now adults. Her professional background as a lactation consultant, childbirth educator, and doula has given her deep insight into how experiences travel through families across time. She is also the author of the anthology Round the Circle: Doulas Share Their Experiences, which brings 22 doulas together to share their expertise.
Tamara MC discussed Julie’s book with her by Zoom. This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
Tamara MC: Your professional life has been dedicated to supporting mothers and babies. How did this work connect to your Holocaust memoir project?
Julie Brill: In college, I naively thought [birth work] was the opposite thing; if [the Holocaust] was all death and horror, I was going to focus on birth and joy. Of course, working with new parents who are struggling isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, but my feeling was to go into the most joyful field possible: life. Throughout my career—childbirth educator, labor doula, postpartum doula, and since 2017, lactation consultant—I’ve focused on families in the childbearing years. Now I see the connections. What happens in that beginning, that parent-child bond, impacts everything after. The book was similar. I researched the past but did it for my kids and their kids. Both involve understanding how experiences move through family systems and how healing occurs across generations.
TMC: You had a difficult Holocaust education as a child. How did that shape your approach as a mother?
JB: I had a very scary, nothing-held-back Holocaust education in Hebrew school in the early 1980s. I was fascinated and terrified, having nightmares and thinking about who might hide me when the Germans came. It all felt very close. When I had my own kids in the ’90s, I was determined to protect them from that. They knew their grandfather’s stories but didn’t have any other context until much later. I don’t know if that was a particularly healthy response either, but I wanted to create a different experience for my daughters.
TMC: What parenting philosophy guided your approach to protecting your children while honoring family history?
JB: My parenting philosophy was to keep them little as long as possible, try to skip over the teenage stuff, and when you couldn’t keep them little anymore, let them be grown-ups. At some point, I included them in understanding our family’s place in Holocaust history. They were both interested in different ways and at different times.
TMC: How did your experience as a mother influence your approach to writing about intergenerational trauma?
JB: My father wasn’t even three when the occupation began. He remembers things with a small child’s perspective. His flashbulb memories—these bursts from his childhood—came through so purely when he told them to me that it was almost as if his little-boy self was speaking directly to my young self. When we do Holocaust education, we don’t do it to marinate in the past. We do it to impact the future.
TMC: What role did your mother play in your memoir-writing process?
JB: My mother is in the book and has read it several times. As an English major, she helped move the commas around. I didn’t publish anything she didn’t want in the book. This is my dad’s story, my dad’s family story, and my story of uncovering it. I shared things with my parents as the project evolved. But my mother was never driving the research. It’s not her passion or her story. She has her own, different Jewish family history.
TMC: How did writing about your father’s memories change your relationship with him?
JB: My father was in Serbia as a child after the war, learning a version not focused on the Holocaust. He went to Israel in 1948 when they were putting the Holocaust behind them, so again, not much discussion. Then he came to Boston and worked like an immigrant for 40 years, so he wasn’t focused on it either. Through working on the book, he’s become fascinated. I knew these stories to a point, but with my adult perspective, I could ask other questions. Sometimes he couldn’t remember, but sometimes he did, or remembered later, so the family stories became richer. When I find family history or family members we didn’t know existed, it’s been a gift for him to have stories he should have had that didn’t get passed down because he lost his father so young.
TMC: What advice would you give mothers writing about difficult family histories?
JB: Memoir is maybe the trickiest kind of writing because most people don’t write memoirs when something happy happens. Maybe Eat, Pray, Love is the exception, but mostly you write about difficult things you’ve been through, so you have a lot of people coming through with their hard stories and their hard experiences. My advice is to look for a supportive community.
Allow major people in the story to read it. I included my father all along. I wouldn’t have written it if he had objected. I published several pieces before finishing the memoir, and showed him each of those before they were published. When they were out in the world, he had people he knew responding to them, and he could see that. He was very much involved, even fact-checking—”really, is this what happened?”
TMC: Can you tell us about your work with the educational nonprofit 3GNY?
JB: Since 2021, I’ve been volunteering in middle and high school classrooms, sharing my family’s story through 3GNY. The 3G means third generation—grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. I also co-facilitate trainings for new classroom presenters with Living Links, a national organization through the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, established by Steven Spielberg. My involvement has been twofold. I’ve been speaking in schools virtually since 2021. The kids really listen and ask great questions. These are communities that aren’t mine, with very different kids thinking about this story outside their own experience. It’s not their families. They may come from trauma, but it’s not this trauma. I’ve also been involved in training speakers, where you take somebody’s family story that they’re trying to make into a 20-minute presentation that a ninth grader who doesn’t know much about the Holocaust can relate to. What do you leave in? What do you take out? When do you say what? We’re not experts on the Holocaust. We’re just experts on our story.
TMC: Your memoir ends with a multigenerational trip to Serbia. What was significant about bringing your daughters on this journey?
JB: It was a return trip to Serbia I was working toward in my life and in my writing. The book ends in 2022 with this trip. Both my daughters have been to Serbia with my father. If we want this history carried forward, it was essential for them to see it firsthand with him. It’s been something we could all share. Through this process of working on the book, we all now have this understanding of our family’s history. It’s become a way to honor the past while ensuring the stories continue into the future through my daughters and eventually their children.
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