No common place Book

This is one of the most haunting Holocaust memoirs I've read, and I've read a lot of them. The author was a newly minted pediatrician at the Warsaw Ghetto Children's Hospital and went on to sneak over to the Aryan side of the city and join the resistance. Curiously, she writes little about herself -- you know nothing about her life before the war and next to nothing about her family, though she does describe her husband's death and mentions that her mother was deported to Treblinka.

To mention just one of the searing episodes in this story: During the liquidation of the ghetto, as the Nazis were shooting patients and throwing into trucks those that could still walk, Dr. Szwajger went to the tuberculosis ward and gave the children each an overdose of morphine, telling them it would take their pain away. She had promised to stay with the children until the end, so she waited until they all went to sleep, then she ran for her life. But decades later she was haunted by the thought that maybe one or two of them woke up later, alone.

Though this book is frustratingly vague at times and it ends abruptly, I think if I could recommend only five books to someone who wanted to learn about what the Holocaust was like, I Remember Nothing More would be one of them. I applaud the author for her courage to finally tell her story. Very few people are left alive who remember it firsthand; Dr. Szwajger herself died in 1993.