Shadows of Survival

Kristine Keese, born to a middle class Jewish family in Poland, was incarcerated as an eight year old child in the Warsaw Ghetto. After the war, Keese went on to attend Cornell University where she studied Philosophy and later received an ED.D from Harvard University, USA. She worked at the Social Science Research Center at the University of Michigan where she had also been an instructor in the Slavic Languages Department, and later taught at Northeastern University's Department of Education. Most recently, Keese taught in the Sociology Department at Brandeis University. She left academic life to live and work on a fishing boat with her husband, along the coast of Florida and in Alaska, where she was an evaluator for the then newly-instituted Native education program under a grant from the Office of Education. She and her husband also spent a year on the North coast of Haiti attempting to organize a fishing cooperative. Currently they own and manage an organic cranberry bog in Massachusetts.

Keese’s self-reflective attempt to understand what was humanly possible has meaning far beyond the particularities of Germans, Jews and Poles during the Second World War. In her story, told with no melodrama and no self-pity, we see the universal through the particular.”— Marci Shore, Associate Professor of History, Yale University“A fine honest memoir...devastation is lodged in the accumulated detail, one of the reasons publications such as this are so important.” — Natasha Lehrer, Times Literary Supplement

• Acknowledgments Chapter 1: My Personal War Chapter 2: 1939: The Clouds of War Chapter 3: November 1940–July 1942: The Ghetto, First Stages Chapter 4: The Ghetto, Last Stages Chapter 5: The End of Safety Chapter 6: Jasio’s Story and Leaving the Ghetto Chapter 7: Times of High Anxiety Chapter 8: August–August 1944: The Warsaw Uprising Chapter 9: Leaving Warsaw Chapter 10: Waiting for the War to End Chapter 11: Spring 1945: Return to the Convent Chapter 12: Living with Genia in Lodz Afterword: What is Left??? Illustrations Index