Mould, Paul

Raft on the River : A Young Girl's Struggle to Survive in the Shadow of the Holocaust

Miriam Feuer Sorger spent World War II as a fugitive in her own land. Barely escaping the Nazi-built ghetto in her hometown of Kolomyia, when she was only fifteen, Miriam ran for her life through the war-torn countryside of her native Galicia after her blind grandmother was shot to death and her mother and sister carted off to the Belzer concentration camp. Adopting a new identity, Miriam found employment in the home of a Ukrainian priest as nanny to his children, only to realise she had gone from the frying pan to the fire when the local Gestapo commandant turned up as a dinner guest -- and something more. It wasn't until 2006 and her eightieth birthday that she could finally bring herself to recount, in full, the events which had so brutally ripped her from her home and loved ones and tossed her, adrift and alone, onto a river of fear and suffering unequalled, until then, in the twentieth century.