My Father's Roses: A Family's Journey from World War I to Treblinka

Kohner, born in England in 1950, grew up with little understanding of her father's earlier life as a Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia. After his 1987 death, she went through the correspondence, diaries, photographs and other documents he brought from Prague, which spurred her into two decades of research to reconstruct his story. Her odyssey resulted in this poignant portrait of three generations. Many family letters illuminate the narrative, which begins in 1896, when her grandparents met, and ends in the early 1940s, with her 64-year-old grandmother Valerie in Nazi-occupied Prague, writing letters to her sons, aware of her impending doom: “We lived such a beautiful, peaceful life. It's a good thing that no one can take away our memories.” In 1942, Valerie arrived at the Treblinka death camp. Kohler (who died in 2006) provides an evocative, moving but unsentimental book that captures the commonplace details of ordinary lives torn apart by the darkening cloud of world events. (Jan. 15)