Strange and Unexpected Love: A Teenage Girl's Holocaust Memoirs

It took 10 years of psychoanalysis for Heller--of middle-class Polish Jewish background--to face and record five teenaged years of Nazi terror she had experienced in occupied Poland. This trauma culminated, ironically, at the time of their liberation, when her father was murdered. Many suspected Heller's non-Jewish, Ukranian militiaman lover who, along with a peasant family, risked his life to save the rest of her family. The reason for the murder, according to speculation, was the father's disapproval that his daughter's lover was not of their faith. The family's sufferings (near-starvation and illness in a lightless, lice-infested hideaway) are hair-raising and well-told here. With the mystery of her father's death still unsolved, Heller ends her wrenching memoir with her marriage in 1946 to a Jew. In a postscript she writes that she, her husband (who died in 1986), son and two daughters lived in various European cities before emigrating to New York City in the late '60s. (Sept.)