Customer Reviews

What Time and Sadness Spared: Mother and Son Confront the Holocaust

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The main character in this moving book is a teenaged girl, Roma, who is separated from her affluent family and sent to a concentration camp at the age of 16, where she never knows if she will be in the next group of inmates selected to die in the crematorium. Her only solace from the daily horrors is the imagined conversations she has at night, before going to sleep, with her mother. The story of how she manages to survive with her humanity intact and start a new life in Israel makes for gripping reading; I read this book in one sitting. Especially interesting is the epilogue, where she talks about what it felt like to return to Poland nearly 60 years after she left. Adding to the authenticity of the historical details is the fact that Roma's co-author, her son, is a history professor. He writes about the difficulties faced by himself and his mother in writing about her past. Rather than just telling a story, this book addresses the problem of reconciling memory with historical fact, and what it means to write about your past so many years later.