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Loading... A Holocaust Memoir of Love and Resilience: Mama's Survival from Lithuania to Americaby Ettie Zilber
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With the Nazi occupation of Kovno (Lithuania), her life changed forever. Zlata Santocki Sidrer was Jewish, but she survived the horrors of the Holocaust. Gone was her normal life and her teenage dream of becoming a doctor. Instead, she witnessed untold deprivations, massacres, imprisonment, hunger and slave labor before being transported to the Stutthof Concentration Camp. Her story of the death march is a testament to her fighting spirit and the limits of human endurance. Yet the challenges did not end with liberation. Lovingly compiled from recorded interviews and researched by her eldest daughter, Ettie, this is an account of a remarkably resilient woman who raised herself out of the ashes after unimaginable hardship and sorrow. She found love and happiness where none could be expected--a secret marriage in the ghetto, escapes, dangerous border crossings, reunifications, and life-saving friendships. Ettie's quest to learn more about her ancestry led her to Lithuania and Poland-in her mother's footsteps. The author reflects on the impact of her family's experiences on her own beliefs and behaviors, thereby adding to the literature about Second Generation and transgenerational trauma. In these memoirs she honors her family by telling their amazing story of survival and collects evidence to corroborate their painful history. No library descriptions found. |
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This narrative is divided into two sections. In the first section, we get the story of Zlata Santocki Sidrer who was a teenager when the war broke out. She lived in Lithuania with her parents and sisters and their lives changed drastically when the war broke out. The family ended up in different concentration camps and she lost most of her family. She describes not only her time in the camps but also the time after the liberation when people were looking for family. It is amazing that they were able to find loved ones since things were so confusing at that time. The second part of the book is told by Ettie Zilber, one of the daughters of Zlata who went to Europe and visited the places that her mother had lived both before and after the war and visited the concentration camps. She is not only able to tell the story of her family's survival but is also able to look at it from the present day.
This is an important record of the horrors of war and these books need to be read so that the same mistakes aren't made again. ( )