Reviews

“Understanding the past so that we can better shape our future is the theme of psychologist Diane Wyshogrod’s memoir of her mother’s life during World War II, a book written with the hope that fully knowing about her mother’s experiences would help her make better sense of her own. Wyshogrod’s mother, Helen Rosenberg, survived the Holocaust hidden in the cellar of a Polish Christian couple who risked their lives to help preserve hers. Her story is carefully and realistically depicted, with no painful or harrowing details spared. Yet the tale is told with so much warmth and understanding that the reader is buoyed by the emotions and becomes more easily able to accept the facts.

Wyshogrod deftly explores truth – not only factual or historical truth, but the truth of her mother’s life. She poses and answers many salient questions: How could her mother stand what happened to her? What did it do to her? How did it affect her children when she became a mother? Through examining Rosenberg’s experiences and emotions in her youth and her young womanhood in pre-war and wartime Poland, to her post-war life in New York and Jerusalem, Wyshogrod considers the way families are both tied together and pulled apart.

A one-time organizer of children of Holocaust survivors, Wyshogrod analyzes and describes her mother’s life with such insight that she sheds considerable light on the trauma that can be transmitted from one generation to the next. She also depicts the new horizons that can be reached when that trauma is understood. This book is a war memoir but also a mother-daughter story, and it tackles and wrestles to the ground many of the thorniest issues that can arise between the generations, especially those that encompass lives experienced on such different terms Levitra.”.”.”.”

Linda F. Burghardt, Jewish Book World Magazine

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“It’s a wonderful book. Diane Wyshogrod brings her mother’s experiences to life and interweaves them with her own astute thoughts and feelings. A sense of honesty and intimacy pervades the book. Her profound love for her mother comes through beautifully.”

Carol Kaufman
Editor, Jewish Book World

“A remarkable addition to the growing literature of mother-daughter
relationships, as well as to the literature of inter-generational transmission
of trauma. Psychologist Wyshogrod’s long and careful investigation of
her mother’s survival of the Shoah, her Christian rescuers, and her depiction
of her own daily life in contemporary Israel make for compelling reading.”

Helen Epstein
Author of Children of the Holocaust and
 Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for her Mother’s History

“In recording her attempts to coax her mother into speaking about the unspeakable,
Diane Wyshogrod has written a Holocaust memoir that breaks new ground. This
is a book about the transmission of memory, about the conflict between the need to remember the past and the need to transcend it, about the tenderness between
mother and daughter. A compelling addition to our knowledge of the past and,
no less, to our knowledge of ourselves.”

Yossi Klein Halevi
Fellow
The Shalom Hartman Institute

“Anyone who has ever wondered what their mother’s life was really like before
they were born will be riveted by Diane Wyshogrod’s account of uncovering –
and coming to terms with – the story of how her mother survived World War II.
I appreciated every specific detail: of life there, of her mother’s interactions with
her protectors, of Dr. Wyshogrod’s own complex reactions to and feelings about
her mother’s experience … A pleasure to read.”

Deborah Tannen
Georgetown University
Author of You Were Always Mom’s Favorite! Sisters in Conversation throughout their Lives