Yearning to Breathe Free: My Parents’ Fight to Reunite During the Holocaust

On 1 February 1940, a thirty-three-year-old Jewish woman arrived alone in New York Harbor bearing, in her womb, the person who would eventually become the author of this book. Ernestyna Goldwasser had left behind her family, steeped in the rich Jewish culture of Krakow, to seek sanctuary from the marauding Germans, who had invaded Poland the previous fall. As the child of a father who held US citizenship, Ernestyna enjoyed a special status that became priceless when the war broke out. She, too, was deemed a US citizen and thereby eligible to emigrate out of Poland. Unfortunately, Ernestyna’s husband, Chaskel Goldwasser, enjoyed no such status. As his wife, pregnant with their first child, embarked on her journey, Chaskel was forced to remain behind, trapped in the inferno that was soon to engulf and incinerate one third of the world’s Jewish population. Ernestyna entered the US through the famed golden door mentioned in the final words of the Emma Lazarus poem that graces the Statue of Liberty. Unfortunately, because of the anti-Semitic policies of the US State Department, that door remained shut tight to Chaskel. During Ernestyna’s valiant struggle to reunite with her husband, they were able to maintain an intimate and highly emotional correspondence. Many of their letters have been preserved and are presented in this volume as a first-person account of their desperate struggle to find the key that would unlock Chaskel’s imprisonment… before it was too late.