Irena

Irena Mausner (née Frydman) was three-and-a-half years old when the Nazi army invaded Poland in 1939. A few weeks later, they ordered her family to vacate her family home in an elegant Warsaw neighborhood-to leave forever. Irena and her sister, Margaret, hid in a Catholic orphanage on the outskirts of Warsaw during most of the war. Their father, Roman, a soldier in the Polish army, was captured in Budapest in 1944 and taken to a German POW camp; their mother subsisted in the Warsaw Ghetto and then was sent to Ravensbrück, also in 1944.

Improbably, the entire family survived. Thanks to a note that the quick-thinking Margaret had posted to the door frame of their former family home, the Frydmans were reunited.

Surviving the Holocaust is just the beginning of Irena's remarkable story. Her memoir takes us through boarding school in London, a happy marriage to a childhood friend of her sister's, and a move to the United States. Raised in conditions of scarcity, uncertainty, and terror, Irena developed a sense of purpose and of perseverance that drove her to a life of academic and professional achievement and material success. More importantly, she absorbed the understanding of impermanence and the importance of decency-qualities that helped her appreciate a happy marriage and overcome a second round of tragedy that struck late in her life.