Synopsis
This book carries readers into the author's experiences of being an immigrant in America as she struggles to assimilate into a new culture with a new language and a harrowing past. Her Jewish family has lost almost everything in the Holocaust, but her parents are hard workers who are determined to start over and build a new life for themselves and their only child. They are willing to sacrifice—even more than they already have—to ensure that Inge has a promising future ahead of her.
Unfortunately, Inge’s hardships are not over in America. Soon after her arrival in New York City, she becomes ill, and the diagnosis is devastating: tuberculosis. So she goes from one prison to another; for the next two years, she is bedridden in a hospital, once again unable to do all of the things that children her age do. For the rest of her adolescence, her illness will follow her, hampering her opportunities, obstructing her social experiences, peppering her life with long periods of isolation, not just as a rare child survivor of the Holocaust but also as a teenager denied the ability to spend time with others her age, enjoying the life of a typical young woman in the early 1950s. She feels cheated. Who could blame her?
But Inge’s story is not a sad one. She is so grateful to be in America, where her parents can rebuild and find success again. She seizes every opportunity she can for an education. She seeks friendships and love relationships, and she never loses her enthusiasm for time spent with others. She has learned the true lessons of the Holocaust: that human bravery and endurance, compassion and empathy can be limitless.
Today Inge is an activist for tolerance. She is also an accomplished motivational public speaker about the Holocaust, tolerance, and human rights. It is only by recognizing what happened in the past that we can prevent it from happening again in the future.
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