Recollections and Reflections: How I Turned Despair into an Appreciation of Life

This memoir contains many fascinating vignettes about pre-war childhood in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, a child’s-eye-view of the lost world of East European Jewry. It tells the tormented story of the Kovno ghetto as seen by a youngster whose father was a leading figure in the medical life of the ghetto. The author then recounts the long, harsh journey of entering the gates of Dante’s Inferno into the whirlpool of the Holocaust - to Stutthof and Dachau - and moves on to describe his liberation. The author also provides a full and fascinating focus on the post-war years: recovery, organizing education in Italy, and the struggles of starting a new life in the United States, including the high point of obtaining the release of the author’s parents from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Jack Brauns has written a most personal and engaging tale; not only is it a powerful factual narrative, but it is also an uplifting one that rises above the cruelties and savageries of the Holocaust, and is full of hope.