From the Author
My wish in telling this true story is that knowledge of history will create a safer world, and bring to light...
Persecution of the helpless.
Selfless heroism of the rescuer.
Survival of the human spirit.
Love and eternal hope...
From the Inside Flap
Renee Ferson Osten's intense poetry in "A Plant Once Uprooted...", a beautifully designed book combining verse with imaginative photographic art, tells of her early years, when as a young French child she was caught in the evil snare of the Holocaust.
Fleeing to the south of France, her family escaped the German occupation only to be torn apart when Ms. Ferson Osten's mother and father were deported to concentration camps simply because they were Jewish. Before their capture they entrusted their children to an order of nuns, hoping convent life could protect their daughters from the horrors of the Nazis.
Converted to Catholicism, the girls spent the remainder of the war years in the convent, not knowing weather they would see their parents again. At the close of the war, the sisters were sent to a home for orphaned Jewish children. There, they were reunited first with their father, and later with their mother, both of whom had survived the agony of Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
Ms. Ferson Osten captures her story in passionate poetry, which will appeal to children, adolescents and adults. Seen from the point of view of an impressionable young girl, the story relates one child's experience of the Holocaust, but represents the universal story of all the children who suffered during that terrible time.
From the desperate moment the family, seeking safety, fleeing their home, the book reveals the inner emotions a young girls feels as she tries to make sense of her world that makes no sense. Ms Fersen Osten translates the emotions into poetry which will convey to all readers the story of a young girl who, caught in a world dominated by evil, never loses hope.
Inspiring and instructive, the book has both educational and artistic appeal. Ms Fersen Osten makes a heartfelt plea that her story will contribute to the building of a better world, one without the persecution she and her family experienced.
"A Plant Once Uprooted...", beautifully memorializes a terrible time in history, a time to be remembered so it will never be repeated.
