First Hitler, Then Your Father, and Now You

In a memoir written by the daughter of two Holocaust survivors, the author describes her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood in often funny, sympathetic, and compelling stories of growing up in a suburban Chicago household with a father who wanted to live the rest of his life as though he had died yesterday and a mother who wanted more than anything to recapture what she lost. Deborah's mother and father's lives were tragically transformed by World War II. In accounts painstakingly recreated from genealogical research and travel, the author traces her parents' journey from their ancestral homes in Poland and Hungary to their liberation from German concentration camps and finally to their arrival in the U.S. in 1946. Deborah's parents struggle to live with their past while starting a new life with little more than their own considerable wills to survive.