My agent, Alexandra Machinist, says she’s always looking for books that keep her up at night turning pages. For me The Lost Childhood is firmly in that category. After writing a novel that takes place in a German concentration camp, my bookshelves are filled with Holocaust memoirs and I enjoy each new one I read but Yehuda Nir’s is a standout, at times terrifying and poignant, a true page turner.
Yehuda Nir was born in 1930, in Lvov, Poland, to a prosperous family. A gifted storyteller, Yehuda takes us back to June 1941 when the Germans invade eastern Poland and begin executing Jewish men. Yehuda, his mother and older sister Lala are left on their own and plan their escape from the Nazis. They buy forged Catholic identity papers and decide to make their way to Warsaw.
I can’t divulge much else without being a spoiler, but it isn’t giving anything away to say that once The Lost Childhood ends and Yehuda makes his way to Palestine, he teaches himself to read by practicing lines from Macbeth and studies medicine at Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School. He comes to the U.S. for his medical residency and becomes a distinguished psychiatrist who dedicates his life to helping others, often those suffering post traumatic stress disorder as he did.
Yehuda Nir passed away this past July, leaving behind a wonderful family, a professional legacy of love and compassion and The Lost Childhood, proof for generations to come that goodness can triumph over even the most horrible inhumanity.
photo: John Lei for The New York Times
Read the whole story: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/health/yehuda-nir-a-psychiatrist-and-holocaust-survivor-dies-at-84.html?_r=0
