Beatrice Muchman

From Booklist Muchman was born in Berlin in 1933. In March 1939, she, her parents, and four relatives fled to Brussels to escape the Nazi regime. In 1942, Germany occupied Belgium, and Muchman's parents brought her and her cousin to the home of two Catholic women for safekeeping. Her parents were killed; she survived and was ultimately brought to the U.S., where she was adopted by an aunt and uncle in Chicago. Muchman grew up believing that her Jewish parents had abandoned her. In 1990, a box was discovered in her uncle's home that contained faded letters, documents, and old photographs; the letters had been written by her parents in the 1940s. "I finally was able to discover, in a deep, fundamental way, that my parents had loved me more than life itself," the author relates. This important book brings the enormous magnitude of the Holocaust down to a very personal level. It contains poignant black-and-white family photographs and reproductions of passports and other documents.