Is the War Over? Postwar Years of a Child Survivor of the Holocaust

Silten, Gabriele

Gabriele Silten spent much of her childhood in two Nazi concentration camps. Many of her friends and many members of her family were victims of the Holocaust. What she experienced should not have been experienced by any human being, let alone any child. Gabriele's wartime years were vividly described in her first memoir, Between Two Worlds. According to history books, World War II ended in 1945, and those who had survived the ordeal of Nazi concentration camps were liberated, free to resume normal life again. What history books don't tell us is that a trauma of that sort doesn't just end. Perhaps no child survivor of the Holocaust has ever fully healed. Is the War Over? is a moving illustrated memoir that chronicles the years that followed young Gabriele's liberation from the camps, as she patched her life together again. Gabriele Silten now lives a fulfilling and productive life in Southern California, where she has enjoyed success as an academic and a writer. But the memories of her tortured childhood still haunt her. As the memoir illustrates, a person can recover, but no person can forget. Nor should she.