Understanding the past so that we can better shape our future is the theme of psychologist Diane Wyshogrod’s memoir of her mother’s life during World War II, a book written with the hope that fully knowing about her mother’s experiences would help her make better sense of her own. Wyshogrod’s mother, Helen Rosenberg, survived the Holocaust hidden in the cellar of a Polish Christian couple who risked their lives to help preserve hers. Her story is carefully and realistically depicted, with no painful or harrowing details spared. Yet the tale is told with so much warmth and understanding that the reader is buoyed by the emotions and becomes more easily able to accept the facts.

Wyshogrod deftly explores truth – not only factual or historical truth, but the truth of her mother’s life. She poses and answers many salient questions: How could her mother stand what happened to her? What did it do to her? How did it affect her children when she became a mother? Through examining Rosenberg’s experiences and emotions in her youth and her young womanhood in pre-war and wartime Poland, to her post-war life in New York and Jerusalem, Wyshogrod considers the way families are both tied together and pulled apart.

A one-time organizer of children of Holocaust survivors, Wyshogrod analyzes and describes her mother’s life with such insight that she sheds considerable light on the trauma that can be transmitted from one generation to the next. She also depicts the new horizons that can be reached when that trauma is understood. This book is a war memoir but also a mother-daughter story, and it tackles and wrestles to the ground many of the thorniest issues that can arise between the generations, especially those that encompass lives experienced on such different terms.