Rising from the Abyss: An Adult's Struggle with Her Trauma as a Child in the Holocaust

by Sara Avinun

Holocaust survivor Sara Avinun details the stories of human love and compassion that helped her to overcome the nightmares of her past in this devastatingly compassionate autobiography. Born in 1936 into a Jewish family in Poland, Avinun details her first memories from the age of four or five when she was left homeless and without her family, wandering the streets of the villages of Poland during World War II. Alone in the world, subjected to the cruelty of evil people, disease, hunger, and degradation, she found sparks of light in the humanity of the everyday people who crossed her path. Avinun describes how after years of wandering the streets alone, a stranger found her and presented her as a Christian child to an orphanage in a convent. From there, she was adopted by a Christian couple and was raised as their child until the age of 13. She further details how her extended family, which finally found her after the war, tried to return her to her Jewish origins and family, but she refused, and how her adopted parents fought them in the Polish courts and lost. This is a story that deals with powerful universal dilemmas such as religious identity, loyalty, and the battle between two identities.

Genres: Holocaust

287 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2005

Reviews

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rising From The Abyss: An Adult’s Struggle With Her Trauma As A Child In The Holocaust is an autobiography by Sara Avinum. Sara was a four or five-year-old girl in Poland whose Jewish parents and brother were killed and she was left to roam the streets on her own. Finally, she was taken into a Christian orphanage as a Christian girl. She was adopted by a Christian family and raised as a Christian. After the war, her extended Jewish family finally found her and wanted her returned to them. It was only after a court case that she was sent to live with her Jewish family in Israel. She had to make many changes in her life and even as an adult she struggled with these changes.
This autobiography goes back and forth from her current life to her past life. As she struggles with questions of identity and loyalty, she is drawn back into the past. How these struggles affect her family and her professional life as a professor, are described in the book. It is definitely different from any other autobiography I have read. I have read of Jewish children being brought up Christian and never knowing their past; but this is the first I have read of one being given back to their Jewish family and being taken to Israel. I definitely recommend this book.

[Meaghan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is both an adoption story and a Holocaust story. The author survived not only the Holocaust but multiple experiences of being brutally torn from people whom she loved and trusted.

When she was only about four, her parents and older brother were murdered in the Holocaust. She had been living with a Ukrainian Christian woman. The Ukrainian put her out on the street and abandoned her to certain death after she realized Sara's parents would not be paying for her upkeep anymore. Sara eventually landed in a Christian orphanage, using another name and hiding her Jewishness. She was very sick, perhaps dying, and after she left the orphanage had to spend about a year recuperating from all the illnesses and injuries she'd accumulated from her life on the run. She was adopted by a childless Polish couple, the Pilches, who raised her as their own, and took it in stride when she told them she was Jewish.

After the war, Sara's surviving uncles and grandfather found out where she was and demanded that her adopted parents return her. Sara, however, wanted nothing to do with them, and the Pilches didn't want to give her up. What followed was very traumatic for Sara, as she found herself moving from her adopted parents to her biological relatives and back again, as well as brief stints in an orphanage and a boarding school while both sides battled over her fate in court. The court ruled in favor of her biological family, who took her out of Poland as soon as they could. She never saw the Pilches again.

Sara adapted well to life in Israel and still lives there today. She never went back to Poland. She writes lovingly of the Pilches (although without making them into saints), but doesn't have anything kind to say about her uncles and grandfather. I don't know whether she was just trying to show a child's perspective, or whether, as an adult, she still feels anger and resentment towards them. I'm not sure how much contact she had with them after she arrived in Israel; it seems that rather than move into the family home she lived in a kibbutz.

Both sides were trying to do what they thought was right, but their positions were so radically different. After she was basically imprisoned in her grandfather's apartment (she kept trying to run away so they kept her locked up), she asked to write to her parents, meaning the Pilches. Her grandfather angrily responded that they weren't her parents, they were gentiles, and it would be better for her to die as a Jew than to live as a Christian. Even into adulthood Sara carried a great deal of guilt.

I liked the parts of the book that were about her childhood and the custody battle, but I thought the parts where she wrote about her adult life were both uninteresting and unnecessary. The narrative skipped around a lot chronologically, so sometimes I wasn't sure about the order of things. I think it could have used another pass at the editing table. But the story is compelling and I think both adoptees/adopters and people interested in the Holocaust would benefit from reading it.