Jews in the Garden

June 1, 2023
One Holocaust survivor's search for answers in his homeland. Former investigative journalist Rakowsky documents the efforts of her cousin Sam to discover the fates of his relatives in Poland after the Holocaust. Sam had been among the workers who survived the era through the now-famous Oskar Schindler factory. After the fall of communism, he made his way back to Poland for what was to be the first of several visits in an attempt to trace the lives of various family members. The author accompanied him on several of these trips and provides detailed firsthand accounts of what transpired. Over the years, Rakowsky also used her journalistic skills to contribute to the search for answers via friends, public records, and local officials. Much of the book focuses on the rural county of Kazimierza, near Krak�w, where Sam grew up. Upon returning, his first hope was to find cousin Hena, who was rumored to have survived the slaughter of her family after being discovered in hiding. This first search, however, led to a different discovery: the burial place of another family of relatives, the Dulas. Also routed out of hiding and murdered, the Dulas were buried in a small grave together on the property where they hid. For decades after, locals taunted the family living there about the "Jews in the garden" on their property. Both the Dulas and Hena's family, the Rożeńeks, were murdered not by Germans but by fellow Poles near the end of the war. An important part of the author's investigation involved the reality of bands of Polish resistance soldiers who systematically searched for and killed Jews in hiding just prior to Soviet occupation. In the process of discovery, both the author and her cousin came to find that memory of the war in Poland is a sensitive, selective, and politicized topic. An intriguing look into a little-understood and largely unrecognized part of Holocaust history.

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June 1, 2023
Though WWII began with Germany's invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the mind-boggling events that followed--Pearl Harbor, D-Day, Hiroshima--mean that what happened in Poland tends to be overlooked. It is this overlooking that investigative journalist Rakowsky seeks to correct. She folds the story of the Polish Jews into the account of her own obsessive pursuit of truth, which begins with idle interviews of her Holocaust survivor cousin, Sam Rakowski, and continues through 30-plus years as the two of them tirelessly investigate their way through court records, uncooperative witnesses, and nothing-to-see-here secrets in search of Sam's long-lost relative, Hena Rozenek, her family's only survivor of a Nazi purge, as well as the answer to the larger question, What happened in Poland after September 1? Rakowsky's prose is the equal of any novelist, such as on the duo's first trip to Poland: "This was not the subdued old Sam. He was as hyper as a teen on prom night." A thrilling blend of the personal and the historical.

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Starred review from June 16, 2023

Rakowsky leveraged her award-winning investigative journalism skills to help her older cousin, a Holocaust survivor, learn more about their relatives whom, they had been told, had neighbors in their Polish hometown who helped hide them from the Nazis. But their family was never heard from again, and the two wanted to know what happened to them. The author and her cousin went on a decades-long journey to speak to former neighbors. That developed into something akin to a global detective story. Rakowsky utilized primary source materials and searched for people who had firsthand information about their family. At nearly every stage of the process, a painful truth emerges: many people in Poland were deeply complicit in the atrocities of the Holocaust, which compelled her to detail Poland's involvement. VERDICT An engrossing, engagingly written, highly researched account of a journey to find out the truth of what happened to a specific family during the Holocaust. A fantastic title to give to readers interested in Jewish, European, and World War II history.--Jacqueline Parascandola

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