Buried in a cardboard box filled with old diaries, crumbled letters and black and white photos, one manila folder etched with bright-red cursive caught Rachael Cerrotti’s eye.

On the front was a note written by her late grandmother, Hana Dubova, a Holocaust survivor, that read, “For Rachael and Jesse, so you’ll know a little about my life when I was your age.”

For Cerrotti, a photojournalist in her early 20s who’d become fascinated by her grandmother’s journey fleeing the Nazis starting at just 14 years old, that letter was a permission slip, a green light to dive deeper into her grandmother’s 17-year odyssey as a Holocaust refugee.

So starting in 2014, Cerrotti embarked on a journey of her own that would forever change her life, retracing every step her grandmother took across central Europe, Scandinavia and the United States, and creating powerful bonds with the descendants of those who saved her grandmother’s life.

Now after more than a decade consumed by her grandmother’s experience, Cerrotti is publishing her first book, “We Share the Same Sky: A Memoir of Memory and Migration,” to be released Tuesday.

The memoir, published by Blackstone Publishing, currently listed as Best Book of August by Apple Books, is an expanded version of the award-winning podcast Cerrotti released in 2019 under the same title.

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Cerrotti now works as the inaugural storyteller-in-residence for the USC Shoah Foundation, a nonprofit established by Steven Spielberg. The foundation records and collects testimony from survivors of genocides around the world, her grandmother’s story included. Cerrotti says she never intended to spend so much time focused on her grandmother’s story.

When she first asked her grandmother to participate in interviews about her journey for a college project in 2009, it was mainly so she could spend more alone time with her in her last few years of life.

But after she passed away in 2010, Cerrotti felt that even with the hours and hours of interviews she’d conducted, and the massive archive her grandmother had left behind, it still wasn’t enough.

Hana Dubová, left, at 14 years of age, circa 1939, and her granddaughter Rachael Cerrotti, 27 when photo was taken in 2017, both in the Danish countryside almost 80 years apart. Photo courtesy of Rachael Cerrotti

“I had so much of my grandmother’s stuff that I probably could have written a biography of her life without ever leaving my bedroom,” said Cerrotti, while sitting in her apartment in Portland. “But I wanted to hear the language, see the landscape, and explore what it all meant in my life.”

Maybe, Cerrotti says, it was the journalist in her, with an insatiable hunger to uncover everything. Or maybe it was the obligation and responsibility she felt to her grandmother, who died wondering what she’d left behind for the world.

The one thing she knew was that it felt right.

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“At first I was really interested in my grandmother’s displacement, because she was stateless for 17 years,” Cerrotti said. “A lot of times you learn about World War II, you get to 1945, Hitler kills himself and it’s over. But that’s just the beginning of the survival story. My grandmother left when she was 14 and her entire family was killed. I was really interested in what it meant to be a part of a displaced community, and the power it takes to rebuild your life.”

So with her camera equipment and her grandmother’s diaries in hand, Cerrotti packed a bag and set her eyes on the past and the people and places around her. But in 2016, Cerrotti’s husband died unexpectedly. The loss turned her life upside down, and she realized just how much her story had become intertwined with her grandmother’s. She scrapped her entire first draft and began to rethink the story she was telling.

During that time, Cerrotti says her grandmother’s story is what saved her. She moved to the farm in Denmark where her grandmother had once lived, working for descendants of the farmers who saved her life.

Portland resident Rachael Cerrotti retraced the steps of her grandmother Hana Dubova, a Holocaust survivor who stayed steps ahead of the Nazis from Czechoslovakia to Denmark, Sweden and America. Her book, “We Share the Same Sky,” is coming out this week and is part memoir of her grandmother and part biography. Staff photo by Derek Davis/Staff Photographer

“I began to return to these places my grandmother went to for physical refuge, for my own life, for my own emotional refuge,” she said. “My grandmother’s diary started to read differently, and slowly I started to see those subtle moments in my grandmother’s stories in a way I couldn’t have seen before.”

Starting in late 2016, Cerrotti, who was now moving between the U.S. and Europe for as long as her visa allowed, began to tell the story that felt true to herself.

“I really had to embrace becoming a main character in this story because it was sometimes very uncomfortable for me,” she said. “And then also as politics started to shift, with the migrant crisis in Europe, and xenophobia and the anti-immigrant right, it felt like it would be irresponsible to tell the story not through a contemporary lens.”

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In 2018, as she worked on reshaping her memoir, Cerrotti received funding with the help of the USC Shoah Foundation to put together her podcast. The podcast, “We Share the Same Sky,” was listed as one of the best podcasts of 2019 by Huffington Post.

For Cerrotti, the responsibility she feels to tell this story is not just for her grandmother, but also for those struggling in a similar way today, and to future generations.

“I think we all have a responsibility to take a deep breath and say, ‘OK, I understand this history, but what does it mean to me?'” she said. “If I look back at my family history, and why am I here, it’s because people who didn’t know my grandmother, and who did not share her identity, cared about her.”

Don Yaalon, a friend of Hana Dubová’s from the war, holds a photograph of them practicing their Judaism as young refugees in Denmark. The old photo is from 1940. Rachael Cerrotti

Stephen D. Smith, director of the USC Shoah Foundation, also sees Cerrotti’s work as part of a much larger responsibility to bridge past and future.

“As the generations pass, the legacy is handed down to those who live in a divided world with hatreds of so many kinds,” said Smith. “Rachael is connecting the dots between a world that was torn to pieces by hatred and the chance we all have to prevent that reoccurring. I feel like I know Rachael and Hannah through all the people we meet along the way. It is living history.”

Now living in Portland since October, Cerrotti says she is thrilled to be publishing her first book as a Maine author.

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Though she was born and raised in Boston, Cerrotti has vacationed in midcoast Maine throughout most of her life. Maine, she says, has provided her with a sense of consistency that becomes immensely important.

“Maine has been this really symbolic space for me over the years,” she said. “It’s been the only constant location throughout a lot of really drastic changes in my life, so I tried to infuse that into the book a bit.”

Cerrotti is currently working on a monthly podcast with the Shoah Foundation called “The Memory Generation,” which explores testimony from its Visual History Archive, a trove of more than 55,000 interviews with survivors from Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda and other countries.

Looking ahead, the young writer, who’s spent over a decade working on her grandmother’s story, is unsure what’s next.

“I’ve actually been kind of scared of this moment, because now, I’m like, ‘What do I do now?” Cerrotti said. “This has been my purpose for so long, and so I’m really saying goodbye to this chapter of my life.”


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