The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich: A Son’s Memoir (review)

For the most part survivors of the Holocaust have proved to be remarkably resilient. If they were young and physically fit, they were able to emigrate from the Displaced Persons’ camps where they wound up after liberation. In the new countries of emigration—usually the United States, Israel, Australia, Canada, and Latin America—they were able to find jobs or found new businesses, to marry and to raise new families.

Nevertheless war and genocide did not leave them unscathed. Even the strongest among them suffered from heart-breaking and terrifying memories and nightmares. In the privacy of their thoughts and dreams they returned to the ghettoes and the camps where they saw their loved ones killed. If they survived in hiding, they experienced the recurrent terror of an abandoned, hunted animal. However they survived, they felt the irrational guilt of the survivor—“ I don’t deserve to live”—or the realistic guilt of having abandoned loved ones who had depended on them in order to save themselves.

If anything, such memories, anxieties, and nightmares—what psychologists have labeled PTSD: “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders”—became worse as the survivors grew older. When they were relatively young and trying to make it in their new homes they were so preoccupied with quotidian matters that their memories were kept at bay by the daily post-war struggles of work and family. When the demands of work eased a bit, and the children grew up and left home to make it on their own, survivors started to have time on their hands, but it was a dangerous period in their lives. Time left them open to invasion by unwanted memories and anxieties. They were especially in danger when they had lost a beloved mate, another survivor with whom they had established a life after the war. With his or her death they lost the only person who truly understood them and could share their current anxieties and past memories.

Howard Reich is a jazz critic for the Chicago Tribune and a writer for DownBeat magazine. He is also the son of Sonia and Robert Reich, Holocaust survivors, who had made a home for themselves and their two children after the war in Skokie, near Chicago. Years after Howard and his sister had left home and had established separate lives from their parents, Robert died and Sonia suffered a severe mental breakdown. She thought that she was being followed by unknown assailants who wanted to kill her: “I heard his voice in the house. He said, ‘I’m going to put a bullet in your head.’” And so she fled her home, wandering the streets until she was picked up by the police and brought to the emergency room of a local hospital.

Ever the loving and dutiful son, Howard tried to help his mother and to understand her illness. However, it wasn’t until a psychiatrist suggested PTSD that it occurred to him that her symptoms were related to her wartime experiences. He knew her story in outline: When she was ten years old, Sonia had fled the Dubno ghetto as it was being liquidated and had lived in hiding among Polish peasants for four years. After the war she had met Robert, a survivor of the camps; they married and emigrated to the United States.

What had happened to her while she was in hiding Howard didn’t know. Except for some cousins left in Poland, most of her family had been killed. Believing that by piecing together her story he might help his mother recover, and driven too by a reporter’s inquisitiveness, Howard set out to discover Sonia’s remaining relatives in Poland. In Warsaw he met Leon, Sonia’s first cousin—an attractive and accomplished retired military officer—who had grown up with her in Dubno and who like her had fled the ghetto and survived in hiding. Together with Leon, Howard traveled to Dubno and there...