Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust Book

Laura Hillman's I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree: A Memoir of a Schindler's List Survivor is one of those unforgettable first-hand account of the Second World War.

The memoir begins with the period when the writer was still in boarding school in Berlin. She writes, Since Hitler had come to power, it was dangerous for Jews to walk on public streets.

Few days later, she received the news of her father's death, to be followed by her family's deportation to the concentration camps. In spite of the danger in the camps, Laura "Hannelore" Wolff writes to the Nazis and expressed her intent to be deported with her family. Together, they had to endure the persecution by the Nazis.

In this memoir, Laura vividly told of her personal experiences of the holocaust and all the terrors that she and her family had to go through. It was emotional and heartbreaking. Apart from being a story of suffering and persecution, I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree is also a tale of hope and triumph. Amidst their darkest days, she found love in Polish POW Dick Hillman. Their love endured when Oskar Schindler began saving eleven hundred Jews who were to be taken to safety in his new factory in Czechoslovakia.

But survival was never easy. In the end, Laura found herself alone outside the gates of Auschwitz.

The lilacs became the symbol that will always remind her of the love she found in one of history's most brutal times. It holds the promise that love, like lilacs in bloom, shall triumph in the end.