博客來Winner of the 2024 Richard G. Tomlinson Literary Award.
Three generations. One hidden history. A family shaped by what couldn’t be said.
Vienna, 1938. Six-year-old Doris Lichtenthal flees the only home she has ever known. Her mother, Rose, grips her hand as they board a ship for New York-alone. Doris’s father, Paul, has already been arrested and sent to a concentration camp. Her grandfather, Sigmund, a respected Jewish hatmaker with a thriving shop, stays behind, believing he still has time. He doesn’t.
Doris rarely speaks of what came before. She builds a life in America-marriage, children, forward motion-but the past remains: folded into silences and careful omissions.
Decades later, great-granddaughter Deborah Holman begins asking questions. Through letters, archival research, and family memory, she reconstructs what happened-and what it cost-when survival demanded silence.
Inside you’ll find:
- A meticulously researched family story rooted in documents and letters
- Vienna-to-America displacement and the long afterlife of trauma
- A modern genealogical investigation-and what the records still don’t say
- An epilogue on the reparations process and its real-world impact
For readers interested in:
- Holocaust memoir and family history
- Genealogy and archival discovery
- Intergenerational trauma, silence, and survival
