Can you call yourself a survivor if you don’t know what you survived? Becoming Sarah is the story of a woman in search of the answer. She considers Auschwitz her “hometown” yet has no memory of it. Not the obscene conditions of her birth, the mother, or any of the faceless women who protected her. She’s three when liberated, and with no one to tell her who she is or what she might become, Sarah must invent herself. In America, where holes in a person’s past are red flags, she learns that little white lies come more easily than explanations and mask the shame of being “a nothing.” Her offspring suffer their own shame, blindly excusing their mother of any faults, each evolving into her own kind of American, her own kind of Jew, so that when Sarah’s lies come to light, their world explodes. Will they have the courage to forgive her, breaking the chain of trauma passed down and becoming survivors in their own right? Will Sarah find the courage to forgive herself?
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