Painful Joy: A Holocaust Family Memoir

 You would think my sister and I knew everything about our parents, both of whom were Polish Jews who lost everyone in their families, parents, spouses, children, siblings, murdered by the Nazis. But we actually knew nothing, about who they were, where they came from, what kinds of lives they once led or might have had were it not for the Holocaust. It took the last five years to write and research and takes as its central purpose an exploration of their characters and what surviving means. Is surviving sufficient? Can you restore your life or do you have to reimagine it? What were the lasting effects on them and on their second and third generation members of their family? At the same time, by telling their story, it seeks to restore the humanity and individuality that these two survivors had taken from them by the war.

They were among the few who survived the camps, including Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. They met in Sweden after their liberation, only because they both had the same last names. It was a love story that was short lived. This book sets out to try to reconstruct their lives and times beginning with the shtetls of the Polish countryside, as refugees from World War I, and then, new lives established, we watch them torn apart during the Holocaust and afterwards.
   
I try to explore how two people, who were so different, who had lost so much, come together to try to reimagine their lives. My mother spent her whole life trying to be someone else, and ultimately tragically trying to recreate her life in my sister. My father spent his whole life trying to forget what was and what might have been, including his guilt and shame -- ironically dying of Alzheimer's disease. His last words were: "I love you. I just don't know why." Readers learn what was real and what was reimagined and why at the same time I do and how some of that may have helped them survive (though barely) during the war and afterward.
   
There are moments of joy, even moments to laugh, but always for Sam and Frieda, life and joy was always touched by pain, mostly because their lives were so touched by death.
   
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B09RJ8YDF8