Description
Book SynopsisHelen Lewis survived the greatest nightmare ever dreamed by man. Her story is appalling, mesmerising, and one reads with increasing gratitude for her clarity, honesty and courage.' Ian McEwan
Helen Lewis, a young student of dance in Prague at the outbreak of WW2 was herded, like Madeleine Albright, into the Terezin ghetto, then shipped to Auschwitz, in 1942. Separated from her family, she struggled to survive amidst the carnage of The Final Solution. How she did so, and what she did in order to survive, is a gripping story, told with wit, candour, and controlled anger.
Widely praised by many, including Jennifer Johnston, Michael Longley, and the Guardian, and hailed by the Independent for its elegiac simplicity and lucidity', A Time to Speak is an elegant memoir of the Holocaust, humbling in its freedom from bitterness, which will leave no reader unmoved.
Trade ReviewOnly the dead know the whole truth and some of those witnesses who survived have taken upon themselves the painful task of speaking for them… This book is the testimony of a woman who has survived the unsurvivable.
-- Jennifer Johnston
The world needs testimonies like Helen Lewis's... a book of utmost distinction.
-- Michael Longley
Her writing does not need any embellishment or fancy prose; she simply describes scenes as close to hell on earth as it is surely possible to be.
harrowing but uplifting
so much more than a mere memoir
In 117 staggering pages, A Time to Speak is everything a book can and should hope to be.
