Lifesaving letters
Subtitle: a child's flight from the Holocaust
By: Milena Roth ; foreword by David Patterson.
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Seattle
Language: eng
Number of pages: 192
Subjects: Roth, Anna -- Correspondence; Roth, Milena; Jews -- Czech Republic -- Prague -- Correspondence; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) -- Czech Republic -- Prague -- Personal narratives; Kindertransports (Rescue operations); Jewish children -- Czech Republic -- Prague -- Biography; Jewish children -- Great Britain -- Biography; World War, 1939-1945 -- Jews -- Rescue -- Great Britain; Refugees, Jewish -- Great Britain -- Biography
Genres: Correspondence.; Personal narratives.; Biography.
Other titles: Life saving letters
Description: From the publisher: In 1939, in the shadow of Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia, six-year-old Milena Roth was sent away from her home and her loving parents and taken to safety by what came to be known as the Kindertransport, which rescued ten thousand Jewish children from the Holocaust and placed them with guardians in England. When she boarded the train in Prague, expecting to be reunited soon with her parents, Milena was aware of the danger and terror that surrounded her: 'I knew I would die if I didn't go.' At the end of her long journey she found a xenophobic, racist society, 'an anti-Semitic country in an anti-Semitic world.' Milena settled into the household of her mother's English friend from the Girl Guides, who had agreed to take Milena in and who planned to bring her parents to England as well. She spent six uncertain years waiting for her parents and enduring her foster mother's complex ambivalence. Milena learned only after the war that her parents were deported from Czechoslovakia in July 1943 and died at Auschwitz. Whatever the faults of Milena's guardian, she had been genuinely fond of Milena's mother and preserved her old friend's letters. These she gave to Milena, and they form the heart of this book. The first letter dates from 1930; the last, written less than a year before Milena's parents were captured and murdered, is heavy with 'an air of despairing farewell,' an understanding that escape was no longer possible. As an adult, Milena Roth spent many years piecing together the fate of her family and making sense of her life. In this book, drawing on her mother's poignant letters and on her own memories and experiences, she recounts the challenges of integrating, in adulthood, the wounds and bereavements of childhood and of 'regaining the confidence of my place in the universe that had been lost.'
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [189]-190) and index.
"A Samuel and Althea Stroum book."