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Remember Who You Are: Stories about Being Jewish

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As a young child, Esther Hautzig and her family were forced into Siberian exile by the Communists for being capitalists (and thereby inadvertently escaping the Nazi holocaust in Europe), which enables her to bring a personal passion to Remember Who You Are: Stories About Being Jewish. In this anthology of true stories of men and women who lived and died during the Holocaust, the reader is treated to a candid, informative, and occasionally inspiring exploration of the challenge and solace of the Judaic faith on the part of Jews living in Vilna, America, and Israel. There is Esther's vibrant young aunt who sacrificed her life so that her own mother would not die alone in the Shoah; the story of 6,000 Jews rescued in 1940 through visas given by Chiune Sugihara, a remarkable Japanese consul in Lithuania, the story of Barry, a drug-addicted musician who was transformed by Orthodox Jews, as well as Ada and Eddy, whose lives were saved by righteous Christians during the years of the Holocaust. Very highly recommended reading for students of Judaic studies and Jewish life, Remember Who You Are offers true life examples of finding life through faith, sacrifice, redemption, achievement, and community.

If you are seeking a reader-friendly, engaging, informative, and often quite moving account of Jewish life in Europe during the Holocaust, along with related after-matters in Israel and the USA, this collection of 20 true stories is the book worth your attention. Offered in an intimate conversational style, the memoir introduces characters that only a now lost-forever culture could have hosted, even as it also illuminates life-guiding "lessons" we can take from their travails. Lives marked by harm, and yet also by honor; by loss, and yet also by integrity, the men and women you meet are well worth meeting - and the writer is a gifted teller of their story - and thereby of hers as well. Unique among the 120 or so Holocaust memoirs (direct or indirect) I have read as I finish writing an overdue account of the many ways Shoah Jews helped Jews in extremis, this is the book you want to give as a gift - to many - in their best interest.