Publisher's Synopsis
Text in German. "Four letters to the witnesses of my childhood" tells the moving story of a young girl who loses mother and sister in Lwów (Lemberg) due to the violence of the German Wehrmacht and survives the Holocaust on her own. The book is also an impressive contemporary testimony to life in eastern Poland in the 1930s It was not until sixty years after the Holocaust, as a retired doctor in California, that Helena Ganor, born in 1932, began to record her traumatic experiences. In four autobiographical but fictional letters, she directs her gaze to the most important confidants of her childhood: mother and sister (who both perished in the Holocaust), father (who survived as a doctor in the Red Army) and stepmother. In impressive pictures, the author pays tribute to the lives, thoughts and actions of these four people in difficult times. From the child's perspective, it depicts the carefree everyday life with its coexistence of cultures and traditions in an eastern Polish village. And she reports on the tremendous rupture, the pogroms and murders that destroyed the girl's hitherto ideal world with the beginning of the German occupation. The fact that the author also describes her way back to life makes this book accessible and forward-looking for younger readers as well - which is why it is now being published in German.
