The Girl from Sighet

In 1944, Hindi Friedman's idyllic childhood in the Transylvanian Carpathian Mountains abruptly ended when German troops invaded her beloved hometown of Sighet. This memoir, written in the style of a novel, chronicles Hindi and her family's confinement in the town's ghetto, their transport in a suffocating cattlecar to Auschwitz, and the subsequent heroic struggle to survive the inhumane conditions of the concentration camp.

After Russian soldiers liberated Hindi and her sister from a labor camp in the Czech Republic, the young girls immediately faced a harsh new reality. Their liberators were now the enemy. Weak and hungry, the girls escape by foot over the Czech mountains to avoid the savagery of the Russian soldiers. Two years after the war ended, Hindi was again on the run. Trapped in communist Romania, she escaped into Austria and eventually to her new home in America.

This epic memoir spans seventy years, transporting the reader from shtetl life through war-torn Europe to the American suburbs of the fifties and on to the present, allowing us to partake in a remarkable journey from death and despair to hope and rebirth.

Helen (Hindi) Rothbart was born in Sighet, Romania, in 1924. She survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, Weisswasser labor camp, and Communism. She, her husband and infant son immigrated to America in 1949. They settled in Ontario, California, where they raised their two sons. An active member of Pomona's Temple Beth Israel for over forty years, she was sisterhood president and on the Board of Directors for fourteen years. She held posts as Chairperson, President, and Vice President for the City of Hope's Elsie Hirsch Chapter. She is a proud member of the B'nai B'rith, the United Fund, and United Jewish Appeal. She speaks five languages. Her lectures at primary schools, high schools and universities in southern California focus on the history of the Holocaust and teaching tolerance, compassion and empathy. Yet, her greatest accomplishments are her close and binding ties to all her friends and relatives throughout the world, including her Sighet girlfriends. She now resides in Brentwood, California near her two sons and spends most of her time indulging her four grandchildren. Her two sons believe that she is the best baker on the planet. P'nenah Goldstein, co-writer, started her career as a stage manager on Broadway while attending New York University. Her love for the theater allowed her to transition into playwriting. She has adapted her play, Loving Leah, as a film for Hallmark Hall of Fame presented on CBS. She lives in Los Angeles and is active at the Living Torah Center Chabad in Santa Monica.