Holocaust Survival Story of Love and Strength

Author, Adena Astrowsky shares why she wrote the book Living Among the Dead: My Grandmother’s Holocaust Survival Story of Love and Strength.

Why did you write this book?

As a means of coping with the trauma of the Holocaust, my grandmother wrote. She wrote about meaningful things to her such as her childhood, her family, her garden, etc.

Over the years she would send me her writings and I found that as time went by I had them stored in all different places of my home. So, initially my goal was to gather all of my grandmother’s writings and copy them into a bound packet so that my children would have them all in one place.

Then I decided the writings would make better sense if they were imbedded within the context of whatever she wrote about so I began doing some of my own research, including listening to her interview with Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation multiple times, and interviewing her.

As others learned of what I was doing, I began getting requests for copies of the completed product. At the same time, I spent a lot more time learning the historical context that surrounded her writings and decided to also offer my third-generation survivor perspective as I thought it was equally important to help combat current forms of hate and genocide occurring all over the world.

If we don’t begin addressing the roots of hatred, there is no way to ensure another holocaust won’t occur in the future.

Was it difficult writing about your family’s hardship?

It was extremely difficult to write about my grandmother’s hardship because fleshing out the details caused my grandmother to relive the trauma. It was helpful to me that she was interviewed in the late 1990s by Steven Spielberg’s project, the Shoah Foundation, as I was able to learn many of the details through her videotaped interview, but still, asking my grandmother to recount countless details caused her obvious pain which in turn caused me to feel badly.

Another interesting thing occurred during the writing of my book: I was put in touch with a childhood friend of my grandmother’s. This connection came through a contact I was working with at Yad Vashem. I was able to communicate with my grandmother’s childhood friend through a college friend of mine who spoke Hebrew and was living in Israel at the time.

This woman grew up in the same hometown as my grandmother and they were very close in age. Additionally, they lived together in the first ghetto before being separated. She shared with me some beautiful and unknown stories about my grandmother that my grandmother never told anyone. I can only assume that my grandmother had a reason for not sharing certain things and although I knew many would find the stories interesting, I decided not to include some of them in the book.

Now that only a few survivors are alive, do you think this type of book will become a new genre?

As fewer survivors remain alive, any new “Holocaust Memoirs” will decrease. We will likely start seeing a new genre of books like mine, written by descendants, and based on the information they were able to glean from the survivors during their lifetime, their own research, and their own personal perspective.

What is the main message in this book?

Nearly seventy-five years after liberation, we are still witnessing acts of cruelty born out of hatred and discrimination. My message in “Living among the Dead” is to remind people of the beautiful communities that existed before WWII, the lives lost and those that lived on, and the importance to never forget these stories so that history does not repeat itself.

About the Author

Adena Astrowsky has dedicated her career to helping the most vulnerable of our society. She did this by prosecuting child sexual abuse cases and domestic violence cases within the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.

She became the local expert concerning the prosecution of domestic violence-related strangulation cases and taught extensively on that subject.

Currently, she handles post-conviction cases on appeal and foreign extradition cases. Adena taught Sunday School at her temple for eight years, and in her last two years she co-taught “Character Development Through the Studies of the Holocaust.”

Adena contributes articles to MASK (Mothers Awareness on School-age Kids) Magazine, often writing about children’s safety, drugs, law, and order, etc.

Once a month Adena volunteers at a local Scottsdale library with her therapy dog, Charlie, as part of the Tail Waggin’ Tales Program. Adena has also chaired events to raise money for the Emily Center of Phoenix Children’s Hospital. Adena’s greatest role, however, is as the mother of three very active children. She, and her husband, Brad, are kept very busy with their respective dance, theater, music, and athletic activities.

About the Book

Living Among the Dead: My Grandmother’s Holocaust Survival Story of Love and Strength Holocaust Survivor True Stories WWII Book 3 by Adena Bernstein Astrowsky

Genre: Biography, Memoir

Synopsis

This is the story of one remarkable young woman’s unimaginable journey through the rise of the Nazi regime, the Second World War, and the aftermath. Mania Lichtenstein’s dramatic story of survival is narrated by her granddaughter and her memories are interwoven with beautiful passages of poetry and personal reflection. Holocaust survivor Mania Lichtenstein used writing as a medium to deal with the traumatic effects of the war.

Many Jews did not die in concentration camps, but were murdered in their lifelong communities, slaughtered by mass killing units, and then buried in pits. As a young girl, Mania witnessed the horrors while doing everything within her power to subsist. She lived in Włodzimierz, north of Lvov (Ukraine), was interned for three years in the labor camp nearby, managed to escape and hid in the forests until the end of the war.

Although she was the sole survivor of her family, Mania went on to rebuild a new life in the United States, with a new language and new customs, always carrying with her the losses of her family and her memories.

Seventy-five years after liberation, we are still witnessing acts of cruelty born out of hatred and discrimination. Living among the Dead reminds us of the beautiful communities that existed before WWII, the lives lost and those that lived on, and the importance to never forget these stories so that history does not repeat itself.

*2020 Reader’s Favorite Gold Medal Winner in the Non-Fiction – Biography Genre!!

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