Description
Book SynopsisA work of both childhood memory and adult reflection undergirded with scholarly research, Ruth Herskovits Gutmann's powerful memoir recounts her life not only as a concentration camp inmate and survivor, but also as a sister and daughter.
Trade Review“Like most survivors, Ruth asks as the memoir of her wartime experience comes to an end, how she and her twin sister, Eva, were able to survive. Despite marrying and creating a family, she says she struggled with this burden the rest of her adult life.”- Kenneth Waltzer;
“Written in measured and dispassionate prose, Ruth Gutmann’s story of her German childhood and years in assorted Nazi concentration camps brings a compelling voice to the genre of Holocaust memoir. By quietly revealing how the Nazis slowly tore apart the fabric of her comfortable middle-class existence in the city of Hannover and by unashamedly confronting her father’s efforts as a Jewish official to save his family and his community, she demonstrates the complete inadequacy of words like ‘passivity’ or ‘collaborator’ to illuminate the complex human response to evil.”- Muriel R. Gillick, author of
Once They Had a Country: Two Teenage Refugees in the Second World WarTable of Contents
- Foreword
- Kenneth Waltzer
- Acknowledgments
- Time Line
- Prologue
- 1. Early Years
- 2. The Nazi Noose Tightens
- 3. Kindertransport to Holland
- 4. Families Bloemkoper and Meijer
- 5. We Are Back in Hannover
- 6. Theresienstadt
- 7. Birkenau
- 8. Reichenbach and Four Other Lagers
- 9. Liberation
- 10. Time to Reflect
- 11. Then and Now
- Afterword: Primo Levi's Last Book
- Appendix: Circular for Jewish Community Members Anticipating Deportation
- Notes
- References
- Index
