In his youth, when Richard Bank entered his grandparents'' bedroom, he would be drawn to a photograph of his grandfather as a young man standing side by side his brother with both accoutered in WWI German military uniforms. Richard always thought that his great-uncle Berthold was Opa''s only sibling and more than six decades would pass before he learned otherwise. In fact, Opa had two other brothers and two sisters, all of whom perished in the Holocaust. No one-not his Oma and Opa, nor his mother and her sister, nor extended family members ever spoke of this. Such was the way some survivors coped with living in the aftermath of humanity''s most horrific crime. Bank''s memoir is a tale about life in the shadow of The Tree of Sorrow. 

In his youth, when Richard Bank entered his grandparents'' bedroom, he would be drawn to a photograph of his grandfather as a young man standing side by side his brother with both accoutered in WWI German military uniforms. Richard always thought that his great-uncle Berthold was Opa''s only sibling and more than six decades would pass before he learned otherwise. In fact, Opa had two other brothers and two sisters, all of whom perished in the Holocaust. No one-not his Oma and Opa, nor his mother and her sister, nor extended family members ever spoke of this. Such was the way some survivors coped with living in the aftermath of humanity''s most horrific crime. Bank''s memoir is a tale about life in the shadow of The Tree of Sorrow.