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ABOUT THIS BOOK:
A Holocaust survivor's powerful story of escape and renewal.
In 1980, at the age of fifty, Irene Eber returned to her father's hometown of Mielec, Poland, where she and her middle-class Jewish family had first gone in 1938 when they were expelled one evening from their home in Germany. Her journey back would unleash a life's worth of memories, and the result is this extraordinary book.
Eber re-creates life in wartime Mielec: the rivalries and opportunism, the acts of courage and generosity, the constant fear borne by the Jewish community, and the moment in 1942 when the Germans marched all of Mielec's Jews out of town and toward the death camps. And she reveals what was perhaps the defining decision of her life: when an opportunity arose for her to escape, Irene left, despite her father's desperate wish that the family stay together. Thus began her life-long journey toward reconciling her lifesaving grasp at freedom with her heartbreaking separation from her family, setting her on a path to self-acceptance.
In describing her survivor's guilt, despair, and loss-and how she has managed to overcome them while still honoring her past-Irene Eber has made a significant and profoundly moving contribution to the literature of the Holocaust.
From Publishers Weekly:
When the Nazis marched into Mielec, Poland, Eber was a 10-year-old dreaming of romance and happy endings. Her world was punctured by the burning of the butcher shop filled with Jewish men. In this moving memoir, Eber, a scholar of East Asian studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describes her life during WWII and after, and while she presents considerable historical information, her story focuses on war's cruel ability to manipulate human emotions, and the devastating mark it leaves on the human psyche. While Eber's title seems to refer to her decision to escape and leave her family during the war against her father's wishes, her book chronicles the many choices in her lifelong journey of self-discovery: the decision to live though the Germans wanted her dead; to leave her newly reunited family following the war to pursue her dreams; to be proud of her Jewishness; to return to Poland at the age of 50 and come to terms with the fear and guilt that had shadowed her life. Eber describes how, living in California after the war, she attempted to conceal from others her "anxieties, compulsive behavior, strange phobias, fears and nightmares." Eber's book is a penetrating psychological analysis of how she learned to cope with the destructive forces that engulfed her young life.
