Love In A World Of Sorrow: A Teenage Girl's Holocaust Memoirs - Hardcover

Heller, Fanya Gottesfeld

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1932687165 ISBN 13: 9781932687163

Publisher: Simcha Media Group, 2005

Synopsis

Important as both a family history and more broadly, as a contribution to the Holocaust record, this memoir, unflinchingly told more that four decades after it occured, details what can happen in the most extreme and dire of human circumstances. "The unrelenting fear of death and gnawing pain of hunger led to acts of desperation among many who survived; some stole, others lied and schemed. Still others took comfort in intimate relationships that might be considered illicit or misguided in ordinary times. It was not all pure and righteous, but it happened."

Also a story of interfaith compassion, the author and her family were hidden by the efforts of a non-Jewish couple and a sympathetic Ukrainian militiaman at the risk of their own lives. Their developing relationship and the harrowing events that followed lend the book an immediacy and jolt so many years later. Fanya Heller's subtle depiction of her parent's knowledge that it was a non-Jew's love for their daughter that had moved him to hide them; their embarrassment and ultimate acceptance of the situation, leads us to wonder how we would have acted under the same circumstances – as father, mother, or daughter.

About this title

About the Author:

Fanya Gottesfeld Heller came to the United States after the Holocaust. She obtained a B.A. and an M.A. in psychology from the New School for Social Research and honorary degrees from Yeshiva University and Bar-Ilan University. She has also studied art history at Columbia University, philosophy and literature at the New School, and family therapy at the Ackerman Institute. In 1998 she established The Fanya Gottesfeld Heller Center for the Study of Women in Judaism at Bar-Ilan University. In that same year, New York State Board of Regents awarded Mrs. Heller the Louis E. Yavner Citizen Award in recognition of her outstanding contributions to teaching about the Holocaust and other assaults on humanity. Mrs. Heller’s writings have also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and Jewish newspapers nationwide.

To give other educators the tools to effectively teach the lessons of the Holocaust, Mrs. Heller commissions an annual conference on Holocaust education at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City. She also lectures at universities and conferences to promote further awareness of the Holocaust.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

"They coming!" Aunt Lolla shouted.

Trying to shake loose from my nightmare, I rolled deeper into the blanket on the floor of the attic. But footsteps clattering on the stairs shocked me awake.

"Run, get going!" echoed from every room, the panic reverberating through the walls of the stairwell. Doors slammed open as mothers searched in the dark for their sleeping children.

I peered out the window, which looked down on the main avenue of our shtetl, Skala. Through the early-morning haze I could make out figures in German uniforms two blocks away, jumping off a truck, its headlights dimmed; and closer, men with rifles and machine guns kicking in doors. Huge dogs barked, and several that were unleashed darted in all directions. It was, I later found out, the beginning of the aktsia--the day and a half of September 26-27, 1942, when the Gestapo and the Ukraninian militia joined forces to stalk every one of Skala's Jews...

...The thud of bodies colliding on the upstairs landing sounded in my ears as I raced out the door in my nightgown, without coat or shoes. My hair was in curlers, with a kerchief tied around my head, because after dinner the previous evening I had washed and set it in preparation for today's festivities: Succos and my eighteenth birthday.

I dashed towrd the hiding place that my father and uncles had prepared for us. It was at the end of a vast yard five or six blocks long, owned by Grandfather Jacob, whose lumber business had once been the largest in Skala...

Vaulting over boards of lumber inthe yard and tumbling across a rolling barrel, I sprinted straight aheand amid the noise of screams and shots coming from just beyond the wooden fence. From only a block away, the sound of heavy battering was followed by a volley of gunfire. I felt a sudden pain in my shoulder: a bullet must have hit me! Ignore it and run faster, I told myself, but the lumberyard seemed to have gotten longer since the last time I had wandered through it...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simcha Media Group
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1932687165
• ISBN 13: 9781932687163
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 280