Mosaic

This beautifully written following of five generations of a Jewish family was absolutely riveting as it reflected the writer’s love of her Jewish ancestors as she searched for the truth of their existence and any evidence of their lives.. Even though she was aware that it would be impossible to find many of her contemporaries alive and that the horrors of her ancestors’ deaths in World War II and the Holocaust would await her, she fought through their histories with a determined spirit, looking for and interviewing any survivors to find the real truths. She did not approach the
war (and pre-war and post-war for that matter) with a gory, sensationalist approach as many writers do.. She was simply realistic and factual, truthfully shocking. The Holocaust happened and I imagined so much of it must have happened just as she described it because of her impeccable research.. An incredible hatred exists in the world but she overcomes it with caring for the discovery of the truth and she writes of it not in a revengeful manner but simply as a history of her family…
Every student of history should read this book to get a real feeling for anti-semitism and examples of how it has affected so many, how it existed in different nations, and how it was “justified” by the offenders, how it exists today.
I put this book at the top of my best read books ever because I believe in it and I believe in her message.
I want to add that I am not Jewish so I am not stating this from what some might still consider to be a biased point of view. I am stating the above because I am a lover of excellent books and brave people who overcome hatred with love and who have the courage to look into their past regardless of what they know they might find.
Diane Armstrong is a superb writer. In gifting us with her history,she
has been catapulted to the top of my best-read writers of all time.
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As a self-styled student of the Holocaust, I have read many memoirs of survivors. None has touched me, though, in quite the way that “Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations” has. Diane Armstrong’s 100 year record of her family’s history is breathtaking in its depth and heart-stirring in its breadth. She tells of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends whose lives were closely entwined with hers and her parents, almost all lost to the Final Solution. There are no heroes or heroines, only an average family living in the darkest of times. This fact is perhaps what I liked most about the book. They were ordinary people trying to survive an extraordinary era by whatever means necessary. I won’t give a synopsis since other reviewers have done so. I will only urge anyone with a social conscience, an interest in history, a belief that “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it” to read “Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations.”

This is one woman’s story about her search for family history. There were eleven children in her father’s family. It begins in Poland in the 1890’s and goes to the present. It is a story about the barbarism of the Holocaust but it’s much more. It’s the story of the family before, during and after WWII. The family Members are so well described both by the author and through some of their own letters you feel you know them and they all led very interesting lives. Living through the atrocities of the nazi’s changed them forever. But their lives went on and they settled all over the world. It’s the story of their day to day lives and a story of strength and endurance. Every person mentioned in this book from her family to to the 20 something Polish tour guides, to the Catholic priest is a reminder that we can never never forget the past.

It needed a better editor. I found typos, misspellings, sections of text that appeared more than once, and some passages that could have been shortened or eliminated. I also found it difficult to keep all the family members straightespecially given that several individuals went by multiple different names and that at least two shared the same name. However, on the whole it was a fascinating study in survival, be it by chutzpah, intelligence, or simple luck. This is a Holocaust memoir about a family some of whose members survived the Holocaust against enormous oddspeople who arent heroic as much as quick-witted and fortunate. And the book shows these survivors in their old age as the author derives much of her information from their interviews and from their differing perspectives.

It was interesting to see how the human spirit can survive through a horrible time in our World History. The Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi’s was not only a dark time in history, but for humankind. To see how the Polish people actually treated the Jews was as despicable, if not worse, than what the Nazi’s did. Because they knew and did nothing to help their fellow man. (Woman or child for that matter). There was a documentary I saw once about the Mathausen concentration camp, which a survivor spoke after the showing of the documentary. Many prisoners hid jewelry and photos they did not want the Nazi’s to get. (Not only would they never see it again, but they would sell it to further their own greed)
A group took metal detectors over the camp grounds and found all the jewelry, and goods that had been buried. One young German man, who was helping the group, began to cry. He said, “I am so sorry! Even though I was not even born, I am embarrassed for my people, what they did, how they thought. It is unthinkable!” It was all taken to the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C.

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