My Kaddish: A Child Speaks from the Warsaw Ghetto

Masson, who died in 2016, revisits her early years in the Warsaw ghetto in this elegant yet shattering posthumous memoir, which was written in the 2000s after the author visited Poland for the first time since her family fled the country in 1946. Born in 1937 to a Jewish family in northern Poland, Masson was two when the war began, and here captures her early days in jarring snapshots: standing at “eye level” with the “big shiny black boots” of a German officer; watching flies buzz above corpses in the Warsaw ghetto. In 1942 the author’s mother bribed their way out of the ghetto, after which the family lived in a bunker; the author was later sent to live alone on an abandoned farm near Warsaw under a Catholic identity. Masson, her mother, and her father left Poland after the war and eventually settled in America, where­—as her daughter writes in an insightful foreword—she was burdened by “painful memories” and “plagued by compulsions” for the rest of her life, even though she was “whole enough” to become a “vivacious person, tirelessly carrying on a legacy of love.” Rendered in plainspoken yet devastating prose, Masson’s historical narrative is intercut with startling present-day moments (“the other day... there was a very large fly in the bathroom with me, and there in my mind was the scene of corpses on the cobblestone street in the Ghetto”) that powerfully reveal how trauma can lurk in the senses. This is haunting. (Dec.)