In her luminous and engrossing memoir, award-winning writer and teacher, Natalie Hess, takes us from a sheltered childhood in a small town in Poland, into, through, and after the horrors of the Holocaust. When her parents are rounded up and perish in the Treblinka concentration camp, a Gentile family temporarily hides six-year-old Natalia. Later, protected by a family friend, she is imprisoned in her city’s ghetto, before she is sent to a forced-labor camp, and finally, Ravensbrück concentration camp, from which, at nine, she is liberated.
Taken to Sweden, by the Swedish White Cross busses, she adapts to and grows to love her new home, becoming a “proper Swedish School girl,” until, at 16, she is claimed by relatives and uprooted to Evansville, Indiana. There, she must start over yet again, mastering English, and ultimately earning a PhD in literature. As a married young mother, she and her husband move to Jerusalem where they and their three children experience life as Israelis, including the bombing of their home during the Six Day War. Back in the States, they settle into life in Arizona until Natalie’s husband dies unexpectedly when a teenager runs a stop sign and hits his car. In her grief, Natalie moves to Philadelphia to be with her daughter and discovers that life still holds surprises for her, including love.
Hess’s compelling portrait in which terror is muted by gratitude and gentle humor, shares the story of so many immigrants dislocated by tyranny and war. Through her experience as a child separated from her parents, a teenager, young woman, wife, mother, college professor, and later a widow, Hess shows the power of the human spirit to survive and thrive.
Author Biography:
Born in Poland, Natalie Hess Is a Holocaust survivor who has lived and worked in Sweden, the United States, and Israel. She spent many years as a high school teacher in both the U.S. and Israel. She has also worked as an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher and teacher-educator in England, Mexico, and Taiwan. She is the author and co-author of several textbooks and teacher resource books, including Finding Family (University of Michigan Press, 2011), Teaching Large Multi-level Classes (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Stories With a Twist (Alta Book Center Publishers, 1999).
Hess earned a Master of Arts Degree in Education from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Arizona, and she has worked on the faculties of Arizona University in Tucson, as well as Northern Arizona University in Yuma, Arizona where she earned a distinguished teaching award.
She was married to John Hess for 54 happy years and is a proud mom of three splendid daughters and grandma of six outstanding grandchildren. At present, she is a volunteer docent at the Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. She reads and writes both prose and poetry, loves talking with friends, and taking long walks in her adopted city.