Yearning to Breathe Free
My Parents' Fight to Reunite During the HolocaustIn Stock
ISBN: 9789652298645
Hardback
304 Pages
Subjects:
Biography: historical
political & military
European history
The Holocaust
Second World War
Jewish studies
On 1 February 1940, a thirty-three-year-old Jewish woman arrived alone in New York Harbor bearing, in her womb, the person who would eventually become the author of this book. Ernestyna Goldwasser had left behind her family, steeped in the rich Jewish culture of Krakow, to seek sanctuary from the marauding Germans, who had invaded Poland the previous fall. As the child of a father who held US citizenship, Ernestyna enjoyed a special status that became priceless when the war broke out. She, too, was deemed a US citizen and thereby eligible to emigrate out of Poland. Unfortunately, Ernestyna's husband, Chaskel Goldwasser, enjoyed no such status. As his wife, pregnant with their first child, embarked on her journey, Chaskel was forced to remain behind, trapped in the inferno that was soon to engulf and incinerate one third of the world's Jewish population. Ernestyna entered the US through the famed golden door mentioned in the final words of the Emma Lazarus poem that graces the Statue of Liberty. Unfortunately, because of the anti-Semitic policies of the US State Department, that door remained shut tight to Chaskel. During Ernestyna's valiant struggle to reunite with her husband, they were able to maintain an intimate and highly emotional correspondence. Many of their letters have been preserved and are presented in this volume as a first-person account of their desperate struggle to find the key that would unlock Chaskel's imprisonment... before it was too late.
Murray Jack Laulicht holds a BA from Yeshiva College and an LLB summa cum laude from Columbia University School of Law. After serving on the staff of the Warren Commission and clerking for the Honorable Harold R. Medina of the US Court of Appeals in New York City, he practiced law for more than forty years. He is a Chairman Emeritus of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education, President of the American Committee for Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, and a member of the boards of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Stern College for Women, Ohr Torah Stone, and Jewish Federations in Florida and New Jersey. Mr. Laulicht and his wife, Linda, have four daughters and many grandchildren.
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