What Time and Sadness Spared: Mother and Son Confront the Holocaust
Doron Ben-Atar points out in the prologue that this book is a collaboration between a Holocaust survivor and her historian son. Roma Ben-Atar came from an upper-middle- class Ashkenazi Jewish family in Warsaw and experienced the terror of concentration camps. On September 26, 1939, the Germans entered Warsaw, and Roma Ben-Atar relives the changes into a living hell of fear, hunger, and death. She relates the horrors of the camps and the Warsaw Ghetto. "The Nazis tormented and killed us in plain sight of the residents of Lublin." She was then sent to a camp when she was 16, there wavering between acceptance of death and an irrational hope that she would "somehow survive this ordeal and rebuild a life." This remarkable book is a narrative of things that happened to a young girl told by an older woman. There are the memories themselves, there are the mother's recollections of what she thought as she went through the events, and there are the reflections of a mature woman about how she coped.George CohenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved