Prisoner of her past
A son’s Memoir
On the night of Feb. 15, 2001, 69-year-old Holocaust survivor Sonia Reich ran out of her house in Skokie, Illinois, telling police she feared someone was going to “put a bullet in my head.” It took Howard, her son, a year to find a doctor who came up with a specific diagnosis: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In effect, Sonia was reliving her unspoken childhood as a Jew running for her life from Nazis. Sixty years later, Howard traveled the world to discover her untold story. He learned that of the 12,000 Jews in Sonia’s small town of Dubno, Poland, less than 100 escaped machine-gun executions; his mother was one. “Prisoner of Her Past” (originally published as “The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich”) illuminates the demons that haunt Howard’s mother to this day.
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What They Say
“A compelling and compassionate memoir, a moving story of a loving relationship between a mother and son.”
Booklist
“Now Reich can only do what a good son should do – honor his father and his mother, in the best and perhaps the only way possible.”
Washington Post
