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The Pages In Between: A Holocaust Legacy of Two Families, One Home | 
 enlarge | Author: Erin Einhorn
Publisher: Touchstone
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 62311
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 1416558306
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5318092
EAN: 9781416558309
ASIN: 1416558306
Publication Date: September 9, 2008
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Product Description
In a unique, intensely moving memoir, Erin Einhorn finds the family in Poland who saved her mother from the holocaust. But instead of a joyful reunion, Erin unearths a dispute that forces her to navigate the increasingly bitter crossroads between memory and truth.To a young newspaper reporter, it was the story of a lifetime: a Jewish infant born in the ghetto, saved from the Nazis by a Polish family, uprooted to Sweden after the war, repeatedly torn away from the people she knew as family -- all to take a transatlantic journey with a father she'd barely known toward a new life in the United States. Who wouldn't want to tell that tale? Growing up in suburban Detroit, Erin Einhorn pestered her mother to share details about the tumultuous, wartime childhood she'd experienced. "I was always loved," was all her mother would say, over and over again. But, for Erin, that answer simply wasn't satisfactory. She boarded a plane to Poland with a singular mission: to uncover the truth of what happened to her mother and reunite the two families who once worked together to save a child. But when Erin finds Wieslaw Skowronski, the elderly son of the woman who sheltered her mother, she discovers that her search will involve much more than just her mother's childhood. Sixty years prior, at the end of World War II, Wieslaw Skowronski claimed that Erin's grandfather had offered the Skowronskis his family home in exchange for hiding his daughter. But for both families, the details were murky. If the promise was real, fulfilling it would be arduous and expensive. To unravel the truth and resolve the decades-old land dispute, Erin must search through centuries of dusty records and maneuver an outdated, convoluted legal system. As she tries to help the Skowronski family, Erin must also confront the heart-wrenching circumstances of her family's tragic past while coping with unexpected events in her own life that will alter her mission completely. Six decades after two families were brought together by history, Erin is forced to separate the facts from the glimmers of fiction handed down in the stories of her ancestors. In this extraordinariy intimate memoir, journalist Erin Einhorn overcomes seemingly insurmountable barriers -- legal, financial, and emotional -- only to question her own motives and wonder how far she should go to right the wrongs of the past.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Outstanding - A Beautiful and Important Work of Literature December 2, 2008
Erin Einhorn has produced what is perhaps the most important contemporary work in any field regarding Polish-Jewish relations, a step toward healing that is just as important to those two cultures as Barack Obama's election was to white-black relations in America. But that is only one of the truly commendable achievements of this, her first book.
A professional journalist, Einhorn exhibits remarkable objectivity in dealing with what has heretofore been a touchy, painful, and irritating subject to people on both sides of the equation. (See the many passionate, argumentative reviews on Amazon of "Maus" or "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz.")
Far from being an apologist for either side, Einhorn recounts valid examples of Polish anti-Semitic incidents that led many Jews to condemn all Poles in perpetuity. However, she reaches beyond the knee-jerk reaction and indoctrinated posture of earlier generations of Jews, who taught their children to hate all Poles for the actions of some, or bought into those prejudices without any objective considerations of their own. (Even Newsweek magazine once ran an editorial describing Poles as "inherently" anti-Semitic, inferring some freakish genetic predisposition to hate Jews.)
Einhorn reaches back into the Middle Ages, reminding Jewish readers that it was a Polish king who opened the doors of his (then mighty) nation to the Jews, who were being slaughtered in every other European nation at the time. This was the reason that so many Jews were living in Poland when the Nazi holocaust hit -- because they'd thrived in Poland for centuries. She also compares the situation of Poles during WW2 versus other occupied European peoples, people who collaborated more freely with the Nazis, suffered much less than the Poles did under Nazi occupation, yet were given a pass by Jewish historians. She covers all sides of the arguments as they played out in her head, applying her journalistic objectivity to her own subjective conscience as she weighs a multitude of historical facts and exorcises her own prejudices.
But Einhorn's book isn't just about Polish-Jewish relations. It's mainly about her personal quest to investigate the facts about her mother's tale of being saved from the Nazi genocide, and she applies the same soul-searching honesty to that quest, and to her relationship with her mother and other family members.
What one reader-reviewer here complained about--Einhorn's "complaining"--is actually one of the most impressive aspects of this book: Einhorn's ability as a writer to illuminate in great detail the complex mental processes she endured along her journey--the doubts, fears, frustrations, not only of the unfolding story in Poland but also of her hot-and-cold relationship with her dying mother.
Lovers of great literature will appreciate the beauty and fluidity of her prose. Unlike the blunt, clunky writing of some journalists-turned-author, this book flows like a stream through a fascinating landscape. Big ideas sprout from simple sentences. She has a flair for creating and maintaining intrigue, and is very effective at bringing her readers along on her journey, rewarding them with subtle revelations and colorful details.
If you have preconceived ideas about the Poles or life in Poland this book will likely change them. If you enjoy emotionally charged stories about family relationships, particularly mother-daughter relationships, this book will move you to tears.
This book would be a great gift for a friend or family member who is either of Polish or Jewish descent, or for anyone who loves great writing.
It's also a great book for aspiring writers who can learn a lot from the author's masterful balance of language and clarity. I gave it 5 stars. Ten would have been more appropriate.
Suspenseful and moving November 6, 2008
Not only is this a moving memoir, but it's a suspenseful mystery at the same time. I read it cover to cover in 24 hours. This book motivated me to write down my own family history as a letter to my son. An unforgettable book.
Moving Book! November 6, 2008
this was a great story. It made me think about how unexciting my life is, and how I should get out there and investigate my family history. It was moving, and made me cry every chapter. I loved it!
 awful November 2, 2008
1 out of 7 found this review helpful
listening to einhorn complain the entire book about everything from her own family to the family that saved her mother was painful. although it did seem that helping the polish family sort out the property dispute was going to be, at the least, a complicated and potentially expensive endeavour; by the end of the book i got the message that einhorn wasn't even interested in helping them. i hope i would feel more compassion for a family that risked their lives to make my life possible.
Unique Holocaust Story September 30, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
A Jewish baby is born in a Polish ghetto in 1942. In an attempt to save her life, her father asks a Polish gentile woman to look after his young daughter, telling her that he'll be back after the war. Indeed he does return and these two are some of the only members of their family who survive the holocaust. The frightened little girl and her father, a stranger to her, go to Sweden for a few years and then on to the United States where this little girl grows up, marries, and becomes a mother.
Erin Einhorn, a reporter, must have known she had quite a story on her hands, or at the very least a fascinating family history, because the little girl in the story was her mother, Irene Rozenblum Einhorn. Despite her mother's long reluctance and disinterest in speaking of her past, Einhorn is determined to find out who this family is who saved her mother and made her own life possible. This story has become The Pages in Between, an honest and revealing memoir which winds up going in a direction that most holocaust writing does not. Einhorn moves to Poland and is surprised to find that in this country that was ten percent Jewish before WW2, Judaism has now become trendy. There are Jewish restaurants and trinket shops and tours one can go on.
Einhorn visits Bedzin, the previous home of her family, and quite easily finds the house they used to live in, and in it, the family that saved her mother's life, the Skowronskis. The woman who cared for her has died, but her son lives there with his family. He remembers the little girl he thought of as his sister whom they had always hoped would return for a visit. Einhorn visits the family multiple times, taking a translator with her, and over time some frustration on the part of the Skowronskis is revealed. Einhorn learns there is a problem with ownership of the house, and the Skowronskis want to collect on a promise made by Einhorn's grandfather during the war.
Einhorn tries to do what she can to help them, and it turns out to be a terribly complicated and potentially expensive legal matter. At the same time, Einhorn is struggling with the somewhat turbulent relationship she has always had with her mother as well as some life-altering news.
I found this to be a quite compelling story and I enjoyed Einhorn's personal tone throughout the book. I was very impressed with the degree to which she tried to assist the Skowronskis. I felt as though they were giving her a pretty hard time and it would have been easy for her just to walk away. It's an interesting question, really. After what happened in the Holocaust, do people really owe each other for saving a life, or was it just the right (and obviously brave) thing to do? Who should property belong to? The people it was stolen from over 60 years ago, or the people who have since made it their own?
I found this to be a fascinating and unique story and recommend it.
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