For the People I Love and Can't Forget: Poems and Memories of the Holocaust Book

Born in Lodz, Poland, Maria Wajchendler Szapszewicz lost her father and her brothers to the Holocaust. She and her mother barely managed to survive the horrors of life in the Starachowice and Lodz ghettos, in Auschwitz, and in Bergen-Belsen, from which, weighing approximately 55 pounds, she was liberated on April 15, 1945. Subsequently, she endured life in communist Poland and experienced many frustrated attempts to leave the unwelcome homeland post-Poland had become after 1945. This volume captures poignant, and at times hopeful, examinations of her wartime and post-war experiences in poetry and essays.