Rising from the Abyss: An Adult’s Struggle with Her Trauma as a Child in the Holocaust

Holocaust survivor Sara Avinun details the stories of human love and compassion that helped her to overcome the nightmares of her past in this devastatingly compassionate autobiography. Born in 1936 into a Jewish family in Poland, Avinun details her first memories from the age of four or five when she was left homeless and without her family, wandering the streets of the villages of Poland during World War II. Alone in the world, subjected to the cruelty of evil people, disease, hunger, and degradation, she found sparks of light in the humanity of the everyday people who crossed her path. Avinun describes how after years of wandering the streets alone, a stranger found her and presented her as a Christian child to an orphanage in a convent. From there, she was adopted by a Christian couple and was raised as their child until the age of 13. She further details how her extended family, which finally found her after the war, tried to return her to her Jewish origins and family, but she refused, and how her adopted parents fought them in the Polish courts and lost. This is a story that deals with powerful universal dilemmas such as religious identity, loyalty, and the battle between two identities.