Customer Reviews

Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations

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I absolutely loved "Mosaic: A Chronicle of 5 Generations". I have read many Holocaust memoirs & oral histories, but none have moved me as Diane Armstrong's book has.

The strength of "Mosaic" is it's breadth and it's protagonists, the author's family. The central family, that of Daniel & Lieba Baldinger & their 11 children is augmented by cousins on the maternal side (the Spira's) as well as the family of Ms. Armstrong's mother, the Bratters. Although Poland is the setting for the first 30 years or so, as WWII beckons the scope becomes the entire continent of Europe as the now-adult children of Daniel & Lieba pursue their lives.

The majority of the family is caught in Nazi-controlled Poland & thru various ruses attempts to escape being deported to the death camps. These are the most thrilling sections of "Mosaic" because Ms. Armstrong's writing is so vivid that the reader can feel the never-ending fear that she & her family lived with for years. While she & her parents live as Catholics in a small Polish village, her aunt & young cousins are standing behind a wardrobe for days at a time in Krakow; we experience both types of anxiety as well as many others as the author recounts the many ruses various family members undertook to survive.

There were family members outside of Poland during WWII as well. With 2 uncles in France, another uncle who moved his family from Belgium thru Spain to finally end in Rio de Janeiro & various aunts & cousins everywhere from Andorra to Tel Aviv the reader is treated to a kaleidoscope of war experiences. The post-war years & family diaspora is dealt with in detail also.

What makes "Mosaic" especially memorable for me is that nobody is a "hero" or does "historic deeds" at any point in the book. While most Holocaust memoirs are by individuals who somehow stood out from the crowd, this account is of the members of that crowd, the folks who by simply surviving without compromising themselves became heroes. It is a marvelous reminder that everyone has a story worth telling.

The final chapter, in which Diane Armstrong & her daughter Justine return to Poland & reunite with the priest who befriended & helped her family shines with joy & compassion. I truly hope that Father Roman Soszynski had the opportunity to read this book. I hope that you will read it as well.

Many Holocaust biographies and autobiographies seem to be written by men, and the male Jewish perspective often downplays the importance of the women's characters, desires, wishes, actions, decisions, motivations, work, education, etc. You can read this book with a certain delight in noting that she does not spare her male ancestors the usual jabs at character deficiencies that most male-written books aim at the women. For example, she tries to explain at least somewhat the submissive nature of her grandmother, Lieba, Daniel's second wife, who produced the 11 children and suffered from the sheer exhaustion of it. She interviews the grown children of this couple and gets the daughters' points of view on their father, that his sex drive must have been enormous. This is not the usual comment about a male ancestor in a Holocaust novel: too judgmental. That he was also too cheap and very harsh with his children, in spite of a good income from his pipe-installation business, is a grudge brought up countless times: she does not spare the males any criticism. She makes his endless consultation with rabbis on tough questions seem silly at best, dangerous at worst - not dealing with his children appropriately; instead, obsessing with the rules of religion rather than health and well-being.

These are the opening chapters of a long novel about a Polish Jewish family, their fight to survive the Holocaust after invasion of Poland, and their subsequent triumphs abroad. It's exciting reading, but permeated with a realism that an aware female descendant brought to her analysis of her own family. She openly admits that her aunts and uncles (these 11 kids) were not happy so much would be revealed about their real lives and its pettiness, cheapness, fighting and scraping.

As a reader whose own ancestors have the name Armstrong, I say BRAVO! to this author for telling us the truth of a less-than-happy Jewish family, so that they seem MORE REAL than the usual heroic-type stories. Not only is she eager to do so, she writes almost pell-mell headlong into things, as if chatting to us personally at a dinner table. One could criticize the writing as less than perfect, but that too, all the more, gives a wonderful feeling of hearing a true, uneditted family story.

Diane Armstrong traces the history of her family over a hundred years in what is far more more than merely a family a saga but is indeed a pivotal epic of suffering, survival and renewal in Jewish history.
It explores the grand range of human emotions from hope, humour, friendship , love and tenderness to anger, fear, hate, pain and loss.

The real life epic begins in in Krakow, Poland, 1890 when the author's grandfather, when the author's grandfather ,Daniel Baldinger, divorces Reizel, his wife of ten years, because of their inability to produce children, and marries Leiba Spira, the pretty and industrious young daughter of a shopkeeper in his community.
Daniel and Leiba are blessed with a comfortable home and 11 fine children, and this well rounded and beautifully written account takes us through the generations of Dian Armstrong's family, imbibing the reader with the richness of Polish Jewish life, the hopes and trials of the family through the horrors and destruction of the Holocaust and the tenuous survival in hiding of the author as a three year old girl and her parents, posing as Polish Catholics, at the time when the discovery of their being Jewish would have meant certain death.
Through the courage of a young Catholic priest, Father Soszynski and a community that does not betray them, the author's family survive tenuously, against overwhelming odds.
The Nazis and their willing helpers had succeeded in destroying the Jews of Europe, only 250 000 Jews remained alive, of the 3 million that had lived in Poland. In the words of Diane Armstrong "In concentration camps, death camps, ghettos, forest groves, hillsides. villages and cities, six million innocent people had been gassed, beaten, tortured, mutilated, set on fire, buried alive and starved".
And after the war, those Jews that survived in Poland still lived in terror and insecurity. 1500 Jews were murdered by fellow Poles- tiny children were thrown through third floor windows, the wombs of pregnant women ripped open and old people and teenagers battered to death.
3 years after the war, the author, at nine years old, and her family, travelled by ship to Australia where they settled. The author recalls how they could not embark at Port Said, as five Arab armies had attacked the fledgling state of Israel, and in Egypt, as in the rest of the Arab world, all Jews were regarded as enemies.

Many of the author's family made their homes in Israel, as did the majority of Holocaust survivors, and Israel is the where the majority of the descendants of Holocaust survivors live today.
Diane Armstrong's cousin Krysia and her husband Marcel Ginzig describe the importance of making their home in Israel in the pioneering days of the 1950's at a time when ideals meant everything in Israel ,and regardless of material positions and professional status, everyone understood each other and shared a similar past and common goals.
As Marcel recounts "No power on earth can make me leave Israel. Maybe this sounds funny but I was afraid of being a Jew again. Here among Jews, I was an Israeli, I wasn't going to become a Canadian Jew. Maybe I would have been better off in Canada. Certainly I would have led a quieter safer life without wars, hostile Arabs and intifadas, and my granddaughters wouldn't be going into the army.
After the passing of Diane's mother, the author revisited Poland, to retrace her families past, and help fill in the gaps. Here she met Father Soszynski who had saved her and her family. she retraced most of her family's past there, and met with both hostility and friendliness from the people there.
Today there is much openness in Poland towards revisiting the past, and a ken interest among young Poles in Jewish history and culture, as well a strong alliance between the democracies of Israel and Poland. Also, as the author points out, 'Jewish blood runs silently and secretly through millions of Polish veins'

A well written and researched true story. Many, who have grown up after the holocaust, will find it hard to imagine what people went through only a generation ago . Diane was fortunate enough to have many members of her extended family survive (though they have scattered around the world in their effort to do so) and we are fortunate she has written the story of their survival. Readers that are fearful of books about the holocaust that have gruesome details can easily read the book as it is more a book about survival.

Gripping, exciting, and suspenseful reading. Great factual writing with immense feeling. Diane Armstrong took me back to my own childhood. I lost my then nineteen-year-old sister as well as grand parents, uncles, aunts, cousins and friends from school to the holocaust. It was painful as well as joyous to read. The book brought back memories and filled in some necessary gaps from my own past. A reader of a book which I wrote sent me MOSAIC all the way from Australia to the USA. I am very grateful to her. This book encompasses five generations of the author's families including detailed explanations of Jewish traditions then and now. For those of you who escaped the holocaust, you will be able to relate with it. For all others, it will be an eye-opening experience.

First i'd like to thank Ms. Armstrong for writing such a wonderful and powerful book. I could really relate to it and i'm sure many readers have as well. Ms. Armstrong writes so well that it is never a struggle to keep track of the abundance of family members, which can sometimes turn a book sour. Her chronicle of her family will make you ponder about your past. I HIGHLY recommend it! It is a stunning read.

Excellent account of life in pre-WW2 Poland and the devastating years of the war itself. What is so remarkable is that the survival rate of this family was comparatively high compared to other Holocaust stories - mostly as a result of a family that saw the terror coming, and fleeing outside of the eventual jackboot sphere, with Diana's immediate family living precarious daily lives through their sheer wits in Nazi occupied Poland. How remarkably easy reflect our own lives against these - just to be grateful and marvel at the human spirit, read and be grateful.