My Father's Roses

Nancy Kohner

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Like the story behind 'Suite Francaise', the author died shortly after completing this moving family memoir based on diaries and letters that her father brought out of Prague before the Holocaust.

Nancy Kohner spent two decades piecing together her familys history from the suitcase of diaries, letters and photographs that her father brought out of Prague before she died in 2006. The result is the extraordinary and touching record of a Jewish family caught up in the tumult of two world wars. Nancys grandparents and their three children find their sanctuary in the garden of the small town where they live between Prague and the German border called Podersam. There they have their happiest times at the reunion when the eldest son returns from the trenches of World War 1, when their youngest son joins them in the family linen business, and when their daughter gives birth to their first grandchild. But instability and danger are the permanent backdrop. When the Nazi Storm Troopers march into Podersam their lives will never be the same again. The daughter commits suicide while the two sons escape to England and Ireland. The last batch of letters from the grandmother make it poignantly clear that her fate is destined for the death camp of Treblinka.

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