INTO THE FOREST
A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love
by Rebecca Frankel
How one Jewish family from a small Polish village survived the Holocaust.
In her latest book, former Foreign Policy executive editor Frankel focuses on the Rabinowitz family of Zhetel, a “very happy little Jewish town” of about 5,000 during the 1930s. Morris and Miriam Rabinowitz had a large house on the town’s main street, with Miriam’s medicine shop on the main floor. Their two daughters, Rochel and Tania, were born about a year apart in the mid-’30s. Morris, a lumber merchant, had an intimate knowledge of the nearby woodlands, information that later became critical to the family’s survival. “His job took him to the town’s edges and deeper into the Polish Christian farming community, where Morris traded not just in lumber, but in the currency of relationships,” writes the author. Toward the end of the decade, life in Zhetel changed rapidly—first with the nonaggression pact between the Nazis and Soviets, leading to Russian occupation of the eastern section of Poland, and then with the German invasion in June 1941. The Germans targeted Polish Jews, crowding them into ghettos and murdering them in “selections” based on the victims’ short-term value to the occupiers. At one point, Miriam claimed to be the mother of a young boy from a nearby town who was there without his family, a courageous act that saved the boy from certain death. Recognizing the urgent need to get away from German control, the family escaped to hide in the nearby forest, where they survived the war despite terrible privations. Frankel follows the family after liberation, when, after failing to gain entry to Israel, they ended up in the U.S. Her book, based on interviews with family members and original documents, is full of telling details about life before, during, and after the Holocaust. While the central events are harrowing, the text has a gratifying ending.A gripping story of one family’s courage and resourcefulness under life-threatening conditions.