Do you ever wonder if the stories about your family's past are true? Reporter Erin Einhorn did, and spoke at the United Synagogue of Hoboken on Sunday about the time she spent in Poland looking for her roots, and the story of her family in, and after, the Holocaust. 

While members of the United Synagogue of Hoboken enjoyed bagels with tuna salad, egg salad, or cream cheese, Einhorn, who covers politics for The New York Daily News, went into great detail about her book and delivered a passionate account of her family's story. 

"It's Schindler's List meets Bridget Jones' Diary," Einhorn said about her book, The Pages in Between. "Except I never put my weight in."

The book evolves around two stories: the story of her mother, a Jewish baby born during the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland, and Einhorn's own journey to uncover the truth, roughly six decades later.

"I kind of thought the past was like a history book," Einhorn said, but "the past was much more demanding than I had anticipated."

Einhorn left a reporting job in Philadelphia and a new boyfriend to embark on her adventure. She moved to Poland for a year, barely speaking the language and unsure of what she would find. Unsure even, if she would find anything. 

She left the country armed with only two hints: a picture of her mother, her grandfather and an unknown woman (possibly the Polish woman who took her mother into her home during the war), and the address of the house her family used to own before the war. 

In Poland, Einhorn lived in Krakow. One day, she went — together with her three friends  — in search of that very house in the small town of Bedzin, not knowing if the family who had cared for her mother still lived there. 

The woman who had taken in Einhorn's mother had died, but her son still lived in the building. When Einhorn showed him the picture, he recognized his mother straight away.

"It was one of those moments in which history is in perfect reconciliation," Einhorn said. 

Before going to the home, Einhorn had feared that the tenants would not want to see her, thinking she was there to reclaim her family's house. The opposite proved to be true. The tenants were happy to see her and asked her to fix the plumming ("which apparently had been broken for six decades!"). 

Because the building was still registered on Einhorn's great grandparents' names, she spent the following six months searching for proof of documents that would prove their birth and death (as was the case for many other Jews, there was no death certificate of Einhorn's great grandparents who had been killed in the Holocaust). 

Einhorn spoke with passion and humor, making the audience burst out in laughter on more than one occasion. But she was also serious, and spoke about her doubts and fear of failure.

She became most serious when she elaborated about why she had undertaken the immense project. 

In Jewish custom it is common to say that people die two deaths, Einhorn explained. The first death is when the heart stops beating. The second death is the death of being forgotten. 

"I took the people in my family," Einhorn said, "and prevented them from dying the second death."

Erin Einhorn's speech was part of the Synagogue's winter cultural events series, organized by volunteer Razel Solow. The next speaker event will be on February 14, when David Kushner will come and talk about his book Levittown. Brunch will start at 10:30 a.m., the speaker will start at 11 a.m. Costs for members are $18, for non-members it's $25.