She Dared, We Remember
Releasing Memory in the face of war: on speaking up and speaking out
From the time of my grandmother Sophie’s flight from Ukraine to freedom in 1893, to my mother Dorothy’s 1945 wartime poster, to America and Ukraine today—our stories bear witness, in word, image, and memory.
In solidarity with Women for Women International’s #SheDares campaign “to confront conflict-related sexual violence,” I offer this story across three generations, united by survival and the will to thread together women’s stories, to lend our voices, even in the face of violence and war.
“Living here, and throughout my role at The Andreiev Foundation, I see how women who have survived rape, captivity and torture learn to live anew.”
— Anna Orel, “Women Holding Ukraine Together”
These words could have been written about my grandmother Sophie—who fled Ukraine in 1893 to escape rampant antisemitism, violence, poverty. Families, communities, and livelihoods that would one day be almost completely erased.
About my mother Dorothy—who worked as a graphic artist designing safety posters for the Manhattan Project during WWII while my father was serving in the Army in Chicago. When soldiers and civilians were dying. And Jewish populations being erased.
And about me—trying to give voice to what they could not say.
I am partnering with Women for Women International to help amplify their #SheDares campaign, which launched June 10 to confront conflict-related sexual violence. The Andreiev Foundation is their partner on the ground in Ukraine.
The Foundation has conducted a difficult campaign to change attitudes about speaking out about violence against women, and runs a crisis hotline for survivors. They explain to women that they are not alone, and stress the importance of talking about what has happened—to survive together.
It is a story that resonates through space and time, with generations of women who have endured violence, war, and silencing in wars’ aftermath.
It is particularly powerful as I try to put into words the experience of my Ukrainian Jewish grandmother Sophie’s crossing to America, in 1893, as a young woman in transit to meet her betrothed, who would become my grandfather, Abraham Silverstein.
Living by then in Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A., Abe worked in the tool shop making precision tools for the construction of the Central Bridge across the Ohio River from Cincinnati to Newport, Kentucky. “Papa’s Bridge,” as it became known to the family. But it might just as well have been “Mama’s Bridge.”
It granted Abe the means to send for his beloved. Earning five dollars a week, it took him five years to save the money to send for her to travel to America from their tiny shtetl in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in what was then part of the Russian Empire.
But my grandmother’s crossing was marked by violence. Sexual violence. A fact she could not admit to Abe. Or anyone. Ever.
She arrived a different person from the girl who left Kovshevatoe earlier that year at 18. She turned 19 en route. But that girl was gone forever. Now, she could only pray for the safety and security of a new life in America. And to keep the violence that had been perpetrated against her a secret.
Papa’s Bridge. Mama’s Bridge. It was likely that very bridge over which my grandparents traveled together—on foot or by horse and buggy—from Newport, Kentucky, where they were wed by a Justice of the Peace—to their new life together.
Tragically, Sophie’s is a story that keeps happening. Again and again and again.
On June 17, Women for Women will host a global panel discussion to address this very subject, “Standing Up Against Conflict-Related Sexual Violence,” featuring, among others, Liubov Gordiienko from Ukraine’s Office of the Government Commissioner for Gender Policy.
Fittingly, in learning how to pronounce her name, I have learned “Liubov”, is Slavic for “love.”
All the women affected have experienced first-hand what it means to try to protect women’s lives and dignity when every system—legal, social, religious and spiritual—has been shattered by war.
And yet, these women come together to live anew. What does that mean—to live anew—when war, and especially the war on women—seems never-ending?
I can’t even imagine. So I will be listening—and remembering.
Remembering my grandmother Sophie, who came from Ukraine in 1893 carrying the weight of unspeakable trauma.
Because silence, I’ve learned, is not the same as peace.
Women Holding Ukraine Together, Then and Now
#SheDares is a public awareness campaign calling attention to the devastating and too-often-silenced reality of conflict-related sexual violence.
Across the globe—from Congo to South Sudan to Ukraine—women are not only surviving violence but actively rebuilding fractured communities, healing generations, and challenging the systems that seek to disappear them.
In Ukraine, along with The Andreiev Foundation, Women for Women International sends teams of psychologists to reach women survivors of sexual violence who live in Ukrainian villages formerly occupied by the Russians, providing counseling and support.
Among the rising voices is that of Anna Orel, whose testimony on the Women for Women website struck a nerve:
“I don’t want that other victims be silent. All the people in the world, they should know the truth. People in Ukraine, they struggle for their future, for their children.”
Just like we all do.
But when your world has been shattered by war, when violence is a daily fact, the struggle is compounded: how do you live fully? What does it mean to protect your children, to show them love?
And yet, these women live anew.
Sophie’s Silenced Survival
My grandmother Sophia Zazlavskij Silverstein was born in Ukraine in 1874. She fled in 1893, arriving in the United States even before Ellis Island opened wide its gates—and just as nativist backlash was closing America’s open door to those tired and poor commemorated on the Statue of Liberty.
She left behind a life steeped in trauma: pogroms, poverty, conscription, perhaps even the personal threat of sexual violence or trafficking—an all-too-common fate for young Jewish women on the move in the Pale of Settlement. Family clues suggest she may have suffered violence, and a tragic loss during her journey. Of this she couldn’t speak.
I never heard my grandmother’s voice. By the time I knew her, she had suffered a series of strokes, and couldn’t speak. Her only communication with me, a young child, was a slight squeeze of my hand when my family went to visit her on Sunday afternoons.
She never spoke. But I feel her story in my throat.
I was born 83 years after she was, and yet her silence shows up like a constriction around my own throat—an unpredictable coughing spasm to mute my own voice.
And now, hearing Anna Orel speak of women learning to live anew, I recognize that same courage in my grandmother’s silence—not only as suppression, but perhaps as survival.
An act of continuity. An act of faith.
Dorothy’s Peace, Fellowship, Love
My mother, Dottie Silverstein Stevens, Sophie’s daughter, grew up during the Great Depression and came of age during World War II. She was a fine artist, a painter. Obsessed with the question: What Is Art?
She got married and, when my dad joined the Army in 1941, she went with him wherever he was stationed. After years of following my father, David, to Army bases in the deep, rural South, as she reveals in a series of “mini-memoirs” written in her 90s, in late 1944, my dad was transferred to Chicago.
Chicago was Nirvana. They finally got a tiny efficiency of their own on the South Side. The Army even paid for Mom to take art classes at the Chicago Art Institute.
In 1945, she went to work for a brief while as a graphic artist on the Manhattan Project in the Safety Section at the University of Chicago.
Her assignment: to make work safety posters for the scientists on the project: the work they were engaged in was hazardous. Presaging the computer design age by at least four decades, one part of her assignment required her to learn hand-lettering in specific typefaces: Caslon. Strathmore. Paramount.
In her portfolio, I find practice words traced on lined tissue paper: A new slant on an old problem. STEVADOR VICTORY DESIGN. red cross. university. Designed.
And then, a page on thick, high-quality drawing paper. Where her writing is freestyle. Flowing. Designed, you might say.
Even while employed on what would become simultaneously the most brilliant and devastating scientific endeavor of the 20th century, my mother dared to draw peace.
The bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had already been dropped. By then, everyone knew the work of the Manhattan Project. But the science behind it was still secret.
Still employed in the Safety Section, Dottie created a preparatory poster, rendered by hand, during those war years. In it, she encircled an olive branch with the words: PEACE. LOVE. FELLOWSHIP. Doves fly through the lettering, each wingbeat a prayer. To my knowledge, it was never published or reproduced—just kept safe and protected between the covers of her sketch pad for a lifetime.
This, too, was her resistance. A quiet legacy passed down l’dor vador—from generation to generation.
While news of the Holocaust filtered in through closed doors and whispers, while millions of Jews—particularly women and children—were murdered, experimented upon, raped, starved, and silenced, my mother, working to ensure safety for scientists working in a Top Secret lab in Chicago, envisioned—brought into view— something else.
A beautiful message of quiet urgency. Her poster became a message not only for that moment, but for me.
A keepsake of conscience. A relic of refusal.
My Offering — Releasing Memory
Today, I carry Sophie’s silence and Dorothy’s drawings into my own act of resistance:
[re]member the world—a creative tapestry of testimony, memory, and renewal.
It is a space where the voices of women like Sophie are no longer erased, where ancestral trauma and contemporary war echo through poems, letters, and song. A space where Ukraine is not only a geopolitical flashpoint, but a sacred homeland, an ancestral wound, a future worth fighting for.
From UNERASURE to a letter I imagine writing to my grandmother across time, I dare to unseal what was once unspeakable.
“Three women. Three wars. Three acts of creation in the face of erasure.”
A message from then to now. From the Ukraine to the U.S. To US.
United across three generations. And now, a fourth—as my children, Sophie’s great grandchildren, witness war’s unfolding. Not just on Ukrainian land. But on our own.
And tragically, a fifth generation, now at the very start of their young lives, may live through the trauma of a homeland in upheaval. Sophie’s great-great granddaughters.
Here, now. This is where the silence must end.
Sophie dared to survive.
Dottie dared to design peace.
I dare to remember.
How do we end the cycle?
We remember. We speak. We create.
We dare.
I harken back to that poster design of my mother’s—an offering of peace after one of the greatest horrors humankind has ever unleashed. It led to the end of the Second World War.
And now, a constant threat with the potential to end humankind.
FELLOWSHIP. PEACE. LOVE. Not just words. A vision of meeting in the center on an olive branch—all of us—encircled by doves, the universal symbol for peace. Noah’s promise from God, after the Biblical deluge that ended life on this Earth, save for the people and animals on the Ark.
A covenant with humankind.
What covenant might we create for humankind today, one that will change the future for my granddaughters and all of us
: Endless war? Endless violence?
Or hope that, we together—US—have the power to live anew. A rainbow of promise.
LIVE ANEW. For the future, I place my hope in that.
I love this, thank you. We remember 🙏🏼❤️
"Because silence, I’ve learned, is not the same as peace."
absolutely!
Thank you for sharing these parts of your (her)story xx