The voices of three generations of Volga Deutsch women reveal how their legacy of holocaust terror and the prejudice it grew got passed down, parent to child, like a cloud that surrounds a mountaintop, shrouding the majesty above from what lies below.

Suffering starvation and murder as a result of Russian hatred, the Volga Deutsch fled toward the hope of safety in America only to meet the competition of a new nation of immigrants. Prejudice, hate and fear of others caused generations of bias to grow and leave a legacy that waited to be discovered, understood, and healed.

Mama, the matriarch of this Volga Deutsch family, was a quiet but determined woman who suffered unimaginable loss in her life but wore it within her as resilient steady strength. She left her parents and siblings behind in Russia to immigrate to the beet fields in Colorado where she birthed nine children. She later joined the dust bowl migration to the central valley canneries of California and on to the Santa Clara Valley followed by all her children. She learned to speak English enough to pass a California driver test, refused to stop driving well into her eighties, and outlived her husband and two of her children. She managed her home and garden until the day she died at age 91.

Frieda, Mama's eldest girl, was not at all quiet, but just as determined as mama. She was opinionated, driven, and physically as strong as a man. Frieda became a perfectionist against the fears she had of returning to the dirt poor of her childhood and, unconsciously, the legacy of terror within her mother. She could manage anything from the Sunday dinners she cooked for her large family of siblings to the banquets at her church. She loved words and was tasked with writing a history of the town of Sunnyvale where she lived until her death at age 83.

Cynthia, the last still surviving full-blooded Volga Deutsch, was born into the generation of the sixties in America, a flower child who grew into the same determined woman as the women before her. As a single parent, earned two master's degrees and worked as a manager at prestigious medical institutions in the San Francisco Bay Area. She stood up to poor management and to a group of physicians who tried to get her fired but ended with the leader of the coup being the one to leave. When being a superwoman nearly killed her, she built herself a new career in mental health. It was there, with the Internal Family Systems model, that she discovered the seeds of bias, of prejudice, a legacy she inherited. She reached deeply into this legacy to heal the holocaust terror that drove determination, endurance, and perfection in her grandmother, her mother, and in Cynthia too.

Healing a legacy of holocaust terror can be like seeing that majestic mountain from afar, the clouds remain, but one can see above and below the clouds and accept their place on the mountain.