IRENA

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(85 85 85 1)>Irena Mausner (née Frydman) was three-and-a-half years old when the Nazi army invaded Poland in 1939. A few weeks later they ordered her family to vacate her family home in an elegant Warsaw neighborhood-to leave forever. Irena and her sister Margaret hid in a Catholic orphanage on the outskirts of Warsaw during most of the war. Their father Roman a soldier in the Polish army was captured in Budapest in 1944 and taken to a German POW camp; their mother subsisted in the Warsaw Ghetto and then was sent to Ravensbrück also in 1944.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(85 85 85 1)>Improbably the entire family survived. Thanks to a note that the quick-thinking Margaret had posted to the door frame of their former family home the Frydmans were reunited.</span></p><p></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(255 255 255 1); color: rgba(85 85 85 1)>Surviving the Holocaust is just the beginning of Irena's remarkable story. Her memoir takes us through boarding school in London a happy marriage to a childhood friend of her sister's and a move to the United States. Raised in conditions of scarcity uncertainty and terror Irena developed a sense of purpose and of perseverance that drove her to a life of academic and professional achievement and material success. More importantly she absorbed the understanding of impermanence and the importance of decency-qualities that helped her appreciate a happy marriage and overcome a second round of tragedy that struck late in her life.</span></p>