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Ruptured Lives: How Hitler's Final Solution decimated my family and Stalin's Iron Curtain tore it apart is a dramatic and unique true story that's been shaped by the political events of Central Europe. It's shaken by repressive Soviet-style policies, age-old antisemitism, Hitler's annexation of Czechoslovakia, the Holocaust, shifting borders, and political and social dislocation in post-WWII Europe that indelibly mark generations.
It is more than a memoir; it records painful family separations and misunderstandings that led to a significant rift between the author and her sister in Czechoslovakia and an unexpected reconciliation.
Firstly, it's the fascinating story of Leo, the Czech Jewish father, an irascible and abrasive man who, in his own life, is a chemical engineer, an RAF bomber-navigator during WWII, and finally a chicken farmer in Jamaica.
It's a tale of Leo's two daring and dangerous escapes from his homeland to freedom in the West, initially from Hitler's Protectorate and, after WWII, from Stalinist Czechoslovakia, and the tragedy of Leo's Solomonic decision to leave behind a baby daughter whom her maternal grandparents raise under Communism, essentially an orphan, reunited with her mother only after 33 years, and who never knows her father.
Living continents apart in Jamaica and Czechoslovakia under differing and unrelenting political systems, unable to speak the same language, and having dissimilar life expectations, fueled by jealousy and bitter resentment, there slowly and inevitably developed a great rift and a silent chasm.
Thus, it is also the older sister's story, a ghost haunting her parents in Jamaica as she grows up behind the Iron Curtain in communist Czechoslovakia.
But along with their stories, it's about the author's journey of discovery into her Czech, partially Jewish heritage and a quest to define who she is beyond the obvious characteristics, a woman with a Czech name, born in England with no British relatives, speaking English with a Jamaican accent, and living in Germany married to a German.
It is during this search, mainly through archival records, for identity, for ancestors, and for possibly still living relatives, that events take a very unexpected turn. An Israeli lawyer surfaces quite out of the blue with completely unanticipated information relating to the grandparents murdered in Auschwitz 75 years earlier. The long-dead grandparents then miraculously heal the silence, leading to reconciliation in a family almost destroyed by history.
The story starts in Germany when the author's mother meets her eldest daughter for the first time and winds its way through events in Czechoslovakia, Austria, England, Jamaica, Pakistan, both East and West Germany, America, and Israel, finally culminating in the Czech Republic, where the story essentially began.
