His parents only provided bits and pieces of their Holocaust experiences, since he “didn’t need to know.” A few years ago, Willie Handler decided that he did need to know. Thus began a journey into his family’s past, eventually revealing their extraordinary survival and painful losses. Their stories reflect not only the evil that swept Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, but also the resilience of the human spirit.

His parents appeared to have taken some shocking secrets to their graves, forcing the author to view them in a different light. With the acknowledgement of his own buried trauma, and following years of research, he has finally stepped out of the shadows.