Motherland

"I am the child of a woman who survived the Holocaust not by the skin of her teeth but heroically," writes Rita Goldberg. Like Anne Frank, Hilde Jacobsthal--the author's mother--was born in Germany and brought up in Amsterdam, where the Franks and Jacobsthals became close. Unlike Frank, Jacobsthal survived the war, and Otto Frank became godfather to Rita, her first daughter.

Hilde Jacobsthal was fifteen when the Nazis invaded Holland. After the arrest of her parents in 1943, she fled to Belgium, where she spent a year incognito working in the Resistance. She was liberated by the U.S. army in 1944 and shortly thereafter joined the British Red Cross and went to Bergen-Belsen, which had been liberated one week before her arrival. She had hoped to find her parents there but learned that they had perished at Auschwitz. The horror and devastation were overwhelming, but despite her shock and grief Hilde stayed at the camp for two years, helping with the enormous task of recovery. Sorrow and exuberance went hand in hand as the young people at Bergen-Belsen found renewed life.

"Motherland" is the culmination of a lifetime of reflection and a decade of research by Rita Goldberg, who explores not only her mother's life but her own. It brings to life complex and moving stories of survival, intertwined with the story of Anne Frank, as well as the poignant efforts by a daughter to capture her mother's unspoken history.