Adena Bernstein Astrowsky - Living Among the Dead: My Grandmothers Holocaust Survival Story of Love and Strength

I was honored when asked to read and review Adena Astrowskys book, Living among the Dead. What stood out for me is how different this book is from many of the other Holocaust books. I was most impressed with two things: 1) the amount of important documentary information which is often not known or forgotten, and 2) the details about her grandmothers life in labor camps. I feel it is a very important and well-written book that the world needs to read. As I told Adena, she did a Mitzvah (a good deed) for the world by documenting her grandmothers story in such an excellent way. - Ben Lesser, Holocaust Survivor, Author, Speaker, and Founder of Zachor: Holocaust Remembrance Foundation

An inspiring story of values and tradition from generation to generation by a granddaughter who has dedicated her lifes work to being a prosecutor of victim-crimes. Narrative history of the Holocaust through discussions with her grandmother Bubbie who wrote poetry during the Holocaust as well as her thoughts through the years. Bubbies poems, such as The Nostalgic Past, could easily be adapted to middle and high school class lesson plans. - Jay Levinsohn, teacher

Even though it is incredibly difficult to read about the soulless cruelty inflicted upon Jews and other groups during World War II, it is imperative that we do so. The idea that the recurrence of the demonization of an entire race could ever happen again should seem not just implausible, but impossible. Tragically, however, we find ourselves in a world reeling from a resurgence of hate and violence. Against this backdrop, Adena Bernstein Astrowskys Living among the Dead can help serve as an important wakeup call.

Kudos to Astrowsky, Mania Lichtensteins granddaughter, for preserving her grandmothers wartime experiences. I was in elementary school when I first learned that my grandmother was a Holocaust survivor, says Astrowsky. That early exposure to stories of the unthinkable cruelty inflicted on her grandmother left an indelible mark. Through their eyes, Living among the Dead a collection of Lichtensteins writings and her granddaughters observations becomes a gift of immeasurable importance for us all.

This book should be found in every library from middle school on up. Readers will come away feeling a range of emotions. Mine is of enormous sadness tempered with gratitude and the eternal hope that these lessons are not lost on this and future generations. - Linda F. Radke, President, Story Monsters LLC, formerly Five Star Publications, Inc.

I have twice been gifted the opportunity of helping bring forth the stories of Holocaust survivors first when I helped write Cantor Leo Fettmans biography (Shoah: Journey from the Ashes) and then, more recently, when asked to edit Living among the Dead. Understandably, I found both of these experiences to be deeply moving and emotional.

Living among the Dead is Adena Bernstein Astrowskys loving and careful reflection of passages from her grandmothers private journal that Mania Lichtenstein kept as a way of coping with the memories of what shed survived in World War II. In addition to these notes written by Mania Lichtenstein, Astrowsky also spent years talking with her grandmother about her experiences, difficult as though many of these conversations were.

So do we need another Holocaust book? The answer becomes obvious when one sees the rise of hate groups. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, agnostics, and atheists we are all brothers and sisters. But when hatred and discrimination, born almost entirely from ignorance and fear, enter the mainstream of our lives, we very much need this book.

Living among the Dead is another valuable brick in the never again wall that demands constant attention and refortification. - Paul M. Howey, writer and editor

For most Americans alive at the end of WWII, news of the Holocaust came in the form of photographs in USAs most popular magazine - LIFE heaps of skeletal remains and barely human faces staring into cameras General Eisenhower ordered to document Nazi horrors in concentration camps.

A few years later, the best-seller was by the brilliant teenage daughter of a German-Jewish family hiding in Holland. Still read in many American schools, The Diary of Anne Frank ends without revealing the terrible fate we now know all but Annes father shared with the six million.

After half a century, we have come to know the limits of these best-known sources. Most Jews killed were not from Germany, but Eastern Europe. And most did not die in camps, but in their lifelong communities, slaughtered by Einsatzgruppen, then buried in pits, up to tens of thousands a day.

The genius of Living Among the Dead is not just that it is one of only a few memoirs to describe this form of death 20,000 Jews slaughtered in Polish city of Wlodzimierz alone but also conveys how Jews lived in Eastern Europe, which large numbers of todays Jews identify as their place of origin.