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

Kohner, Nancy

3.74

39 ratings by Goodreads

9781605980737: My Father's Roses: A Family's Journey from World War I to Treblinka

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1605980730 ISBN 13: 9781605980737

Publisher: Pegasus Books, 2009

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From their heroic feats on the battlefields of World War I to the rise of Hitler and a tragic culmination at Treblinka, this is one family’s extraordinary history.

Nancy’s father was not like other fathers in their northern English town. Elegantly dressed after the Eastern European fashion, an impeccable violin player, and never without a rose in his lapel, her father’s entire essence alluded to a hidden and haunting past. Upon his death, Nancy, on a quest to rediscover her family’s past, delves into the endless boxes of letters and diaries her father carried when he fled Czechoslovakia in 1939.

There were times of joy: a son’s return from the trenches of Verdune; the birth of grandchildren; a growing family business. But there was also fear. As the first stormtroopers march into Podersam, Nancy witnesses the disintegration of the family through their increasingly desperate letters. My Father’s Roses is a compelling and intimate testament to the persistence of family, memory, and the bonds of kinship in the face of humanity’s darkest hour. 16 b&w illustrations

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About the Author:

Nancy Kohner spent two decades piecing together her family's history from the suitcases of diaries, letters, and photographs her father brought out of Prague before her death in 2006.

From Publishers Weekly:

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)
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