A unique memoir of Holocaust atrocities and life under their heavy influence

Poland, 1942. “My mom told me how her sister, Cirella, threw her two-year-old daughter Bella from the window of the moving train that was taking them to the concentration camp Treblinka. How the mother had leaped after the baby but was killed by the bullet of a Polish guard. Mom told how the toddler was last seen sitting in the place where she had fallen, while a Polish woman gathered her up into her lap. You have a cousin in Wysokie Mazowickie who surely survived. Maybe one day you will manage to find her.”

Sarah Segal tells the horrific tale of the Holocaust, the gripping story of her family and her ravaged home. She relates the story of a family member who served in the special Sonderkommando unit in Auschwitz, who spent six years in the Holocaust with death breathing down his neck. She describes how this brave group of strong Jewish men were forced to aid the Nazis in carrying out the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. How these prisoners of Auschwitz managed to go on after sending their victims to the gas chambers and then to the crematoriums.

The author goes on to describe the defining moments of her childhood after the Holocaust, when her family immigrated to the State of Israel. She recounts her childhood in the shadow of a Holocaust survivor mother, the responsibility she undertook as a child by becoming an anchor for her mother’s bi-polar disorder, and how her family never escaped the ever-present black mantle of the Holocaust.

An Heiress of the Holocaust allows the reader a rare glimpse into the darkest time in human history, and its continuous and devastating effect on the lives of Holocaust survivors and their successors.