Thanks To My Mother

1 Pages 315 Words

Thanks to My Mother by Schoschana Rabinovici is one of the most moving memoirs I have ever read about the Holocaust.

Born Susie Weksler, Rabinovici was only eight when Hitler's forces invaded her Lithuanian city of Vilnius, a great center for Jewish learning and culture. Soon after, her family faced hunger and fear in the Jewish ghetto, but the worse was yet to come.

When the ghetto is liquidated, some Jews are selected for forced labor camps and the rest are killed. Susie would live because of her mother's courage and ingenuity. She carries Susie, hidden in a back pack, to the group destined for the labor camps. Susie is disguised as an adult to fool the guards into believing she is 17. Her mother cares for her body and soul through gruesome conditions in three concentration camps and a winter death march.

This is a haunting book. It is amazing what the human spirit can endure when there is only a bit of hope. Susie's mother is determined that not only will they both survive, but that she will retain her humanity in the process, often sharing rations and thinking of ways to help other prisoners. Rabinovici is unsparing in her recollections: she describes "selections" when babies abandoned by their mothers are trampled, a bathhouse abortion, and a hellish journey on the cargo deck of a ship where the passengers are sprayed with feces and vomit.

The only concession made to younger readers is footnotes that define religious, political and historic terms. Its biggest fault is that the author lacks the redemptive vision of, for example, Livia Bitton-Jackson in I Have Lived a Thousand Years.

Readers whose interests include Holocaust testimonies and do not depend on literary polish, and are mentally prepared for the harshness of Rabinovici's experiences, will come away with renewed appreciation of the extraordinary fortitude required to survive those dire times....