Hope Over Ashes - A Survivor's Memoir of the Warsaw Ghetto

For decades, Louis grew up believing he was an ordinary French boy, completely unaware that his mother's radiant smile masked a harrowing history in the Warsaw Ghetto and Majdanek. When she finally breaks her silence about their Jewish heritage, her staggering memoir of survival forces him to confront the dark secrets that secured his very existence.

Warsaw 1939. Rena, a young Polish Jew, was only 15 when World War II broke out. And from then, things went very fast, plunging millions of lives into horror and despair.

Through Rena’s memoir we follow her in a day-to-day struggle for life, struggle for survival. We shudder for her in her unstoppable descent to hell, from the Warsaw ghetto to the camps of Maidanek and Auschwitz. We discover daily details there, full of cruelty and dehumanization. And at last, we feel relieved with her when comes the time of her liberation by the Soviets. She also tells us how, after her miraculous survival, she came to rebuild a totally new life in Western Europe.

But how to rebuild a wrecked life? To how many generations would the curse extend? Rena extraordinarily managed to protect her children from her dreadful past. Her son describes how she educated her family in an atmosphere of optimism and faith in the future. Beyond a heartbreaking testimony on the horror of Holocaust, her memoir is a lesson and message of hope to the next generations. In a belief that knowledge of the past can avoid repeating the same horror in the future.

Time has passed. The memory of what has happened tends to fade away. We presently live in a world where menaces and tensions have never been so high, not mentioning high intensity wars raging here and there. Now more than ever, it became vital to refresh our culture on the tragedies that were experienced in the world’s recent past.

Rena’s memoir reminds us how proper awareness is the unavoidable path to a peaceful world. “We may always keep hope”.