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    Looking for Strangers: The True Story of My Hidden Wartime Childhood
    Looking for Strangers: The True Story of My Hidden Wartime Childhood
    Looking for Strangers: The True Story of My Hidden Wartime Childhood
    Ebook213 pages3 hours

    Looking for Strangers: The True Story of My Hidden Wartime Childhood

    By Dori Katz

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    Dori Katz is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who thought that her lost memories of her childhood years in Belgium were irrecoverable. But after a chance viewing of a documentary about hidden children in German-occupied Belgium, she realized that she might, in fact, be able to unearth those years. Looking for Strangers is the deeply honest record of her attempt to do so, a detective story that unfolds through one of the most horrifying periods in history in an attempt to understand one’s place within it.

    In alternating chapters, Katz journeys into multiple pasts, setting details from her mother’s stories that have captivated her throughout her life alongside an account of her own return to Belgium forty years later—against her mother’s urgings—in search of greater clarity. She reconnects her sharp but fragmented memories: being sent by her mother in 1943, at the age of three, to live with a Catholic family under a Christian identity; then being given up, inexplicably, to an orphanage in the years immediately following the war. Only after that, amid postwar confusion, was she able to reconnect with her mother. Following this trail through Belgium to her past places of hiding, Katz eventually finds herself in San Francisco, speaking with a man who claimed to have known her father in Auschwitz—and thus known his end. Weighing many other stories from the people she meets along her way—all of whom seem to hold something back—she attempts to stitch thread after thread into a unified truth, to understand the countless motivations and circumstances that determined her remarkable life.

    A story at once about self-discovery, the transformation of memory, a fraught mother-daughter relationship, and the oppression of millions, Looking for Strangers is a book of both historical insight and imaginative grasp. It is a book in which the past, through its very mystery, becomes alive, immediate—of the most urgent importance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateSep 24, 2013
    ISBN9780226063331
    Looking for Strangers: The True Story of My Hidden Wartime Childhood

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    • 3/5
      Dori Katz was born in Belgium to Jewish parents during the Holocaust. After her father’s arrest and deportation to a concentration camp, Dori’s mother placed her with a Gentile family in a Belgian town. Dori was later placed in an orphanage for a couple of years before being reunited with her mother after the war. Several decades later, Dori saw a documentary featuring the woman who had taken her to her host family’s home. It awakened her curiosity about her surrogate Belgian family. Although the couple who gave her a home had both died by this time, she was able to reconnect with their children. The author had mixed feelings about the reunion. It is apparent from her narrative that she had unresolved psychological issues stemming from her experience. While I believe it’s important for all Holocaust survivors to tell their stories, each of which is unique, there are parts of Katz’s story that I think would have been better kept between the author and her therapist.

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    Looking for Strangers - Dori Katz

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