Thanks To My Mother

Thanks To My Mother

Thanks to My Mother by Schoschana Rabinovici is one of the most moving memoirs I have ever read about the Holocaust.

Born Susie Weksler, Rabinovici was only eight when Hitlers forces invaded her Lithuanian city of Vilnius, a great center for Jewish learning and culture. Soon after, her family faced hunger and fear in the Jewish ghetto, but the worse was yet to come.

When the ghetto is liquidated, some Jews are selected for forced labor camps and the rest are killed. Susie would live because of her mothers courage and ingenuity. She carries Susie, hidden in a back pack, to the group destined for the labor camps. Susie is disguised as an adult to fool the guards into believing she is 17. Her mother cares for her body and soul through gruesome conditions in three concentration camps and a winter death march.

This is a haunting book. It is amazing what the human spirit can endure when

holocaust, survive, susie, rabinovici, camps, readers, mother, labor, jewish, ghetto, come, younger, yet, years, worse, winter, whose, weksler, ways, vomit, vision, vilnius, unsparing, trampled, times, through, three, thousand, thinking, testimonies, terms, susies, sprayed, spirit, soul