Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love

by Rebecca Frankel

Overview

Rebecca Frankel's Into the Forest is a gripping story of love, escape, and survival, from wartime Poland to a courtship in the Catskills.

A 2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist

One of Smithsonian Magazine's Best History Books of 2021

"An uplifting tale, suffused with a karmic righteousness that is, at times, exhilarating."—Wall Street Journal

"A gripping narrative that reads like a page turning thriller novel."—NPR

In the summer of 1942, the Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi ghetto in their Polish town by fleeing to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest. They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war they trekked across the Alps into Italy where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States.

During the first ghetto massacre, Miriam Rabinowitz rescued a young boy named Philip by pretending he was her son. Nearly a decade later, a chance encounter at a wedding in Brooklyn would lead Philip to find the woman who saved him. And to discover her daughter Ruth was the love of his life.

From a little-known chapter of Holocaust history, one family’s inspiring true story.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250874900
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/07/2023
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	475,450
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Rebecca Frankel is the author of New York Times bestselling book, War Dogs: Tales of Canine Heroism, History, and Love. She is former executive editor at Foreign Policy magazine. Her work has appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and National Geographic, among others. A Connecticut native, she lives in Washington, DC.

Table of Contents

Part I: Before

Prologue:

Chapter 1: A Wedding in Vilna

Chapter 2: The Town Named After a Bird

Part II: The War

Chapter 3: The Russians Invade

Chapter 4: The Germans Invade

Chapter 5: Back to Zhetel

Chapter 6: The Ghetto

Chapter 7: The Resistance

Chapter 8: The Selection and the Boy from Belitsa

Chapter 9: The Escape

Part III: The Forest

Chapter 10: The First Winter

Chapter 11: The Second Summer and the Boy with the Frozen Feet

Chapter 12: Liberation

Part IV: After

Chapter 13: The Long Road Home

Chapter 14: Across the Alps and to the Sea

Chapter 15: In America

Chapter 16: A Wedding in Connecticut

Epilogue

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

06/14/2021

Journalist Frankel (War Dogs) recounts in this gut-wrenching yet inspirational history how a Polish Jewish family survived the Holocaust by hiding in the Bial owiez a Forest in eastern Poland for almost two years. The story is framed by college student Philip Lazowski’s chance reconnection, in the U.S. in 1953, with Miriam Rabinowitz, the woman who had saved his life in April 1942 by claiming him as her own child during the first “selection” of Jews in the Zhetel ghetto. Drawing on extensive interviews with the Rabinowitz family and other survivors, Frankel recreates their desperate struggle to stay alive during the liquidation of the ghetto in August 1942. Amid the grim details, including adults suffocating infants in order to prevent their cries from revealing hiding spots, Frankel weaves in moments of remarkable resilience and good fortune. In particular, she describes how lumber dealer Morris Rabinowitz used his familiarity with the forest and relationships with local Christian farmers to help keep his family and other Jewish refugees alive until the Soviets took control of the area in 1944. The stroke of luck that led to Lazowski’s reunion with Miriam Rabinowitz and his marriage to her daughter Ruth in 1955 mirrors the random twists of fate that enabled the family to survive, while so many others didn’t. Readers will be on the edge of their seats. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Alma's 8 JEWISH BOOKS YOU SHOULD READ THIS SEPTEMBER

NAMED ONE OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL'S BEST 10 BOOK OF SEPTEMBER

""Frankel is an extremely gifted writer." —Roxanne Coady, What Should You Read This Summer on Just the Right Book

"Page-turning... an even more improbable fairy tale about rescue, reunion and romantic love."

—The Forward

“[An] extraordinary story."

—Booklist

"A gripping story of one family’s courage and resourcefulness under life-threatening conditions."

—Kirkus (Starred review)

"Inspirational... Readers will be on the edge of their seats."

—Publisher's Weekly

"An excellent choice for serious book clubs that have previously chosen challenging titles like Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key and Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française."

—Book Trib

“Frankel demonstrates the resilience of the human spirit, even when all appears to be lost.”

—Peter Bergen, author of The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden

"One of the most moving, thrilling, inspiring books anyone will read all year, fiction or non-fiction!"

—David Rothkopf, author of Traitor

"Gave me goosebumps, actual goosebumps... Thrilling and heartwarming, without masking horror and tragedy.”

—David Plotz, former CEO Atlas Obscura, author of Good Book

"Set in one of the world's last remaining primeval forests, this story of horror and heroism has the trappings of a grim fairy tale: Once upon a terrible time, after so much loss and devastation, one unlikely couple found their happily ever after."

—Ilana Kurshan, author of If All the Seas Were Ink, winner of the Sami Rohr Prize

“Hard to put down... A tragic, yet uplifting, tale of human fortitude and love that needs to be told and widely read.”

—Allan Levine, author of Fugitives of the Forest

“What makes Into the Forest truly memorable is Frankel’s uncanny empathy for her characters... She never allows us to look away, nor do we want to, no matter how terrible the events of this powerful narrative.”

—Glenn Frankel, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author

From the Publisher

★ 09/01/2021

Frankel (War Dogs: Tales of Canine Heroism, History, and Love) has written a fascinating and captivating account of one Jewish family, the Rabinowitzes, living in Poland before and during World War II. In 1942, the Nazis forced Polish Jews, including the Rabinowitz family, into ghettos. From the Zhetel Ghetto, the Rabinowitzes escaped to the nearby Białowieza Forest, where they built shelters and lived for two years, surviving bitter cold, illness, starvation, and the ever-present threat of being caught. Frankel writes that luck was on the Rabinowitzes' side when they found old family connections who kept them safe until the Red Army seized control of the area in 1944. Fast forward to Brooklyn, NY, in 1954, when the story comes full circle because of a chance meeting. Frankel draws on primary source materials, including interviews with members of the Rabinowitz family, to create a beautifully written account of escape and survival that will engage readers from the start. She shares her subjects' stories with sensitivity and care. VERDICT This fast-paced book will find an eager audience among readers interested in Jewish, European, and World War II history; highly recommended.—Jacqueline Parascandola, Univ. of Pennsylvania

Library Journal

★ 2021-07-22
How one Jewish family from a small Polish village survived the Holocaust.

In her latest book, former Foreign Policy executive editor Frankel focuses on the Rabinowitz family of Zhetel, a “very happy little Jewish town” of about 5,000 during the 1930s. Morris and Miriam Rabinowitz had a large house on the town’s main street, with Miriam’s medicine shop on the main floor. Their two daughters, Rochel and Tania, were born about a year apart in the mid-’30s. Morris, a lumber merchant, had an intimate knowledge of the nearby woodlands, information that later became critical to the family’s survival. “His job took him to the town’s edges and deeper into the Polish Christian farming community, where Morris traded not just in lumber, but in the currency of relationships,” writes the author. Toward the end of the decade, life in Zhetel changed rapidly—first with the nonaggression pact between the Nazis and Soviets, leading to Russian occupation of the eastern section of Poland, and then with the German invasion in June 1941. The Germans targeted Polish Jews, crowding them into ghettos and murdering them in “selections” based on the victims’ short-term value to the occupiers. At one point, Miriam claimed to be the mother of a young boy from a nearby town who was there without his family, a courageous act that saved the boy from certain death. Recognizing the urgent need to get away from German control, the family escaped to hide in the nearby forest, where they survived the war despite terrible privations. Frankel follows the family after liberation, when, after failing to gain entry to Israel, they ended up in the U.S. Her book, based on interviews with family members and original documents, is full of telling details about life before, during, and after the Holocaust. While the central events are harrowing, the text has a gratifying ending.

A gripping story of one family’s courage and resourcefulness under life-threatening conditions.

Kirkus Reviews