Four Letters to the Witnesses of My Childhood

The evocation of memory is wrought with emotional and historical significance in this distinctive Holocaust memoir. With lyrical prose and remarkable candor, Helena Ganor narrates her story through a series of recently penned letters to the significant people in her life during her wartime girlhood: her sister, mother, father, and stepmother. Both Ganor's mother and sister perished during the Holocaust. The author's letters reveal much about living in pre-war Lvov, Poland, and its surrounding area. Her descriptions of relationships between local Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and Gypsies in southeastern Poland lend a broad historical context to the Holocaust. Ganor combines deeply personal reminiscences of struggling as a Jewish child cast out alone to survive under Nazi occupation with reflections on the varied ways that humans respond to impending catastrophe. Punctuating her letters with poems, Ganor's story is an inspiring contribution to Holocaust literature.