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Buried Rivers: A Spiritual Journey into the Holocaust
“. . . provides a fresh take not only on the Holocaust, but also the proper response to the seemingly inerasable stain left by profound anguish . . . A moving and original contribution to an inexhaustible body of literature.” —Kirkus Reviews
After the Holocaust, how do we not lose faith in each other—or in ourselves? This 2nd generation Holocaust memoir explores the powerful bonds between the living and the dead—against the backdrop of generational trauma.
To the disappointment of her parents, Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, the author began following a Buddhist teacher at the age of 19. Though her parents were not particularly religious, they felt betrayed and, with the help of a domineering uncle, took strong measures to try to pull her away from what they believed was a cult.
Over three decades later, on a German train, Ellen felt the presence of spirits who had died in the Holocaust and had lost all trust in basic goodness. Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, their plea for help sent her on a series of life-changing journeys to Poland to reconcile the Holocaust with basic goodness. Could her years of meditation finally prove helpful to her family lineage instead of a betrayal?
In 2006, she travels to Poland, the Holocaust’s largest graveyard, and to her mother’s city of Łódź, to reconnect with her family's tragic history while exploring basic goodness—not theoretically, but in her bodily experience. In 2009, she moves to Łódź to study Polish at a language school called “Babel,” where she is the only American in a class comprised largely of Arabs. With no elders still alive to consult, she relies on an account dictated before his death by her bullying uncle, an Auschwitz survivor, for clues to her family’s past.
As she retraces her mother’s and uncle’s steps through Europe and walks in the places where her ancestors lived for centuries, she stumbles into a mysterious stream of love—if only she can receive it. Increasingly aware of her own traumatic imprints, she realizes that helping the dead is inseparable from healing her own wounds. And that opening to the darkness we habitually avoid brings a transformation that widens our perception and changes us forever.
Beyond recovering her family’s lost history, this compelling memoir reveals powerful connections between spirituality and trauma, and intimately explores the challenges of family loyalty, crossing religious boundaries, and opening to the invisible blessings of ancestors. With unflinching emotional honesty and deep inquiry, channeled through a poetic spirit, “Buried Rivers” reveals how healing, magic, and life itself can transform fear and open our hearts despite unimaginable suffering.
After the Holocaust, how do we not lose faith in each other—or in ourselves? This 2nd generation Holocaust memoir explores the powerful bonds between the living and the dead—against the backdrop of generational trauma.
To the disappointment of her parents, Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, the author began following a Buddhist teacher at the age of 19. Though her parents were not particularly religious, they felt betrayed and, with the help of a domineering uncle, took strong measures to try to pull her away from what they believed was a cult.
Over three decades later, on a German train, Ellen felt the presence of spirits who had died in the Holocaust and had lost all trust in basic goodness. Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, their plea for help sent her on a series of life-changing journeys to Poland to reconcile the Holocaust with basic goodness. Could her years of meditation finally prove helpful to her family lineage instead of a betrayal?
In 2006, she travels to Poland, the Holocaust’s largest graveyard, and to her mother’s city of Łódź, to reconnect with her family's tragic history while exploring basic goodness—not theoretically, but in her bodily experience. In 2009, she moves to Łódź to study Polish at a language school called “Babel,” where she is the only American in a class comprised largely of Arabs. With no elders still alive to consult, she relies on an account dictated before his death by her bullying uncle, an Auschwitz survivor, for clues to her family’s past.
As she retraces her mother’s and uncle’s steps through Europe and walks in the places where her ancestors lived for centuries, she stumbles into a mysterious stream of love—if only she can receive it. Increasingly aware of her own traumatic imprints, she realizes that helping the dead is inseparable from healing her own wounds. And that opening to the darkness we habitually avoid brings a transformation that widens our perception and changes us forever.
Beyond recovering her family’s lost history, this compelling memoir reveals powerful connections between spirituality and trauma, and intimately explores the challenges of family loyalty, crossing religious boundaries, and opening to the invisible blessings of ancestors. With unflinching emotional honesty and deep inquiry, channeled through a poetic spirit, “Buried Rivers” reveals how healing, magic, and life itself can transform fear and open our hearts despite unimaginable suffering.
320 pages, Paperback
Published October 11, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 29, 2018
How does Buddhism speak to the Holocaust?
Early on in Ellen Korman Mains’s compelling account of her spiritual journey as the child of survivors to make sense of the Holocaust, she observes the irony that one schooled by Buddhism to live in the present could make it her life’s work to grapple with demons of the past.
It is one of many contradictions she resolves during seven years of investigations into Poland’s past and present. In discovering the details of her own genealogy, and of her family members’ experiences in the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz and other locales, she illuminates broader issues of responsibility and reconciliation that will be of interest to any student of the Holocaust.
I’ll admit I approached the book with some trepidation about the Buddhism focus. I was interested in learning a Holocaust family story, but wasn’t sure how I would respond to Mains’s spiritual quest. But my skepticism ebbed away as I began reading, drawn in by the author’s vivid descriptions of inner and outer landscapes and her skillful weaving together of multiple narrative strands.
Soon I arrived at a tacit agreement with the narrator to suspend disbelief and experience her visions and insights as written, including claims of spiritual communication with ancestors and spirits (dralas) representing unnamed murdered Jews seeking closure for their interrupted lives. The first such encounter occurs aboard a train in Germany, when she is touched by the presence of dralas that compel her to seek a Buddhist understanding of the Holocaust.
This sets in motion her long quest to not just to understand her family’s Holocaust experience but in some ways to make peace with it. Guided by a few pages of Holocaust testimony left by an uncle, her journeys take her back to Poland for repeated trips, each time unraveling more details of her family’s story and opening new ideas for further inquiry.
She also travels back through the personal history that led her to this quest: her Montreal Jewish childhood, her rebellion as a young woman, her relations with her two parents and uncle, and then the deaths of these three founding influences in her life. We also meet her community of friends and associates in Boulder, Colo., where she lives and teaches, and at international workshops and conferences she attends.
Despite my preconceptions, it is precisely because of Mains’s Buddhist training and outlook that the book is so interesting. She applies skills of intentional observation, awareness, and introspection, honed from a lifetime of meditative practice, both to interrogate the terrible events of the past and to reach an accommodation with them in the present.
Early on in Ellen Korman Mains’s compelling account of her spiritual journey as the child of survivors to make sense of the Holocaust, she observes the irony that one schooled by Buddhism to live in the present could make it her life’s work to grapple with demons of the past.
It is one of many contradictions she resolves during seven years of investigations into Poland’s past and present. In discovering the details of her own genealogy, and of her family members’ experiences in the Lodz ghetto, Auschwitz and other locales, she illuminates broader issues of responsibility and reconciliation that will be of interest to any student of the Holocaust.
I’ll admit I approached the book with some trepidation about the Buddhism focus. I was interested in learning a Holocaust family story, but wasn’t sure how I would respond to Mains’s spiritual quest. But my skepticism ebbed away as I began reading, drawn in by the author’s vivid descriptions of inner and outer landscapes and her skillful weaving together of multiple narrative strands.
Soon I arrived at a tacit agreement with the narrator to suspend disbelief and experience her visions and insights as written, including claims of spiritual communication with ancestors and spirits (dralas) representing unnamed murdered Jews seeking closure for their interrupted lives. The first such encounter occurs aboard a train in Germany, when she is touched by the presence of dralas that compel her to seek a Buddhist understanding of the Holocaust.
This sets in motion her long quest to not just to understand her family’s Holocaust experience but in some ways to make peace with it. Guided by a few pages of Holocaust testimony left by an uncle, her journeys take her back to Poland for repeated trips, each time unraveling more details of her family’s story and opening new ideas for further inquiry.
She also travels back through the personal history that led her to this quest: her Montreal Jewish childhood, her rebellion as a young woman, her relations with her two parents and uncle, and then the deaths of these three founding influences in her life. We also meet her community of friends and associates in Boulder, Colo., where she lives and teaches, and at international workshops and conferences she attends.
Despite my preconceptions, it is precisely because of Mains’s Buddhist training and outlook that the book is so interesting. She applies skills of intentional observation, awareness, and introspection, honed from a lifetime of meditative practice, both to interrogate the terrible events of the past and to reach an accommodation with them in the present.
June 9, 2023
Looking for her Jewish roots in Poland Ellen Korman who is a Buddhist practioner and a student of the Trungpa Rinpoche take us on a spiritual yourney: by tracing back her family members who were murdered in the ghetto of Lods, Auschwitz and Dachau, she finds herself and soothen the souls of her murdered family in fundamental goodness.
June 19, 2019
"Buried Rivers" takes the reader on a haunting journey, a quest to find meaning and facilitate healing from the profound horror of the Holocaust.
I was inspired by Mains’s commitment to following the subtle prompts of her inner wisdom--to which she is attuned thanks to her years of Buddhist practice—even when it leads her through painful and perplexing places in the inner and outer worlds.
The trip is at once deeply personal and universal in its example of how one may look evil in the face and wrest a sort of redemption from its ashes. You travel along in wonder as Mains finds her way, step by step, to heed the mysterious call for help she received from the spirit world. She writes with grace and has a special gift for lyrical and arresting metaphors. A fascinating book.
I was inspired by Mains’s commitment to following the subtle prompts of her inner wisdom--to which she is attuned thanks to her years of Buddhist practice—even when it leads her through painful and perplexing places in the inner and outer worlds.
The trip is at once deeply personal and universal in its example of how one may look evil in the face and wrest a sort of redemption from its ashes. You travel along in wonder as Mains finds her way, step by step, to heed the mysterious call for help she received from the spirit world. She writes with grace and has a special gift for lyrical and arresting metaphors. A fascinating book.
March 30, 2019
An Open Question
Ellen's story and it's telling brings one in to her world. A world of a modern day refugee inviting coincidence and the moment to guide her. This story many of us share with our own lost family history and the trauma they encountered. This book is well written and holds one through the homecoming Ellen invited in to her life.
Ellen's story and it's telling brings one in to her world. A world of a modern day refugee inviting coincidence and the moment to guide her. This story many of us share with our own lost family history and the trauma they encountered. This book is well written and holds one through the homecoming Ellen invited in to her life.
October 27, 2018
A Spiritual Cruicible
Woven into more than a decade-long journey, this is a spiritual crucible the likes of which I’ve never encountered and is a testament to Ellen Main’s willingness to go to any lengths for the benefit of us all. Throughout the book, Ellen also teaches, shedding light on puzzling life lessons and concepts.
Through the pages of Buried Rivers, we see Ellen meet her heart teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, risk the loss of her family of origin, question every inch of reality as she knew it, and stand up for herself in big ways to finally discover the truth of who she is.
Ellen’s somatic recall is uncanny! Her compassion for unknown souls of the holocaust is deep and enriching. Her bravery at tracing the steps of her ancestors along the railroad tracks, into killing chambers and mass graves left me in tears after many chapters.
Ellen is/was undaunted in her quest and has revealed a body of work that needs tending even today. Buried Rivers thoroughly captured my heart. ~Susan Rees
Woven into more than a decade-long journey, this is a spiritual crucible the likes of which I’ve never encountered and is a testament to Ellen Main’s willingness to go to any lengths for the benefit of us all. Throughout the book, Ellen also teaches, shedding light on puzzling life lessons and concepts.
Through the pages of Buried Rivers, we see Ellen meet her heart teacher, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, risk the loss of her family of origin, question every inch of reality as she knew it, and stand up for herself in big ways to finally discover the truth of who she is.
Ellen’s somatic recall is uncanny! Her compassion for unknown souls of the holocaust is deep and enriching. Her bravery at tracing the steps of her ancestors along the railroad tracks, into killing chambers and mass graves left me in tears after many chapters.
Ellen is/was undaunted in her quest and has revealed a body of work that needs tending even today. Buried Rivers thoroughly captured my heart. ~Susan Rees
January 20, 2019
This is a moving and important memoir about one woman’s search for her ancestors lost to the Holocaust, her sometimes troubled relationship with her parents, and her determination to apply her Buddhist beliefs to heal the pain of her ancestors. It’s a personal journey and a brave one, as Ellen Korman Mains travels to her ancestral home of Poland, where she knows almost no one and where she struggles to learn the language. Her main survival tool is meditation, which gets her through the hardest and loneliest times. "Buried Rivers" raises important questions: how do we handle extreme emotional pain and how do we keep our faith in the Buddhist belief that humans are inherently good—especially in the face of one of the most horrific genocides in human history?
January 9, 2019
Sensitive exploration of once hidden past, buried river is well written, researched and enjoyable.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews