Looking for Strangers: The True Story of My Hidden Wartime Childhood
“As a blond, blue-eyed child, I easily passed for Christian.” Now an American academic and poet, Katz survived the Holocaust in Belgium; after Dori’s father was deported to Auschwitz, her mother sent Dori, at age 3, to hide with a Catholic family in a village near Brussels. More than 40 years later, she returns to find the family that saved her, even while her bitter mother in the U.S. tells her not to go. Spare, wry, frank about family conflict and loss, this searing memoir captures the immediacy of Dori’s childhood experience as well as her present-day guilt and ambivalence (“Were they angry with me for never contacting them? Would I like them? Would they like me?”). She had two personalities at age 3: the public Flemish Astrid (“I let Astrid do all the talking”) and Dori, who speaks to herself in Yiddish. While she expresses wonder at the fact of the rescuers (“the work and effort of strangers to save a child like me”), the commentary never denies the savage history. --Hazel Rochman