Overview

Born in Belgium in 1939 to Jewish parents who had been forced to flee their beloved home in Berlin six months earlier, Sylvia Ruth Gutmann spent the first three years of her life in hiding with her family in the south of France. In the summer of 1942, three-year-old Sylvia, her two older sisters, and her young mother were arrested by the Vichy police and shipped to the French internment camp in Rivesaltes. Shortly thereafter, her mother was deported to Auschwitz, leaving her three children behind. Six months later, Sylvia's bedridden father was also deported to Auschwitz. Sylvia and her sisters would never see their parents again. Deeply traumatized, Sylvia arrived in New York City at age seven, where a well-meaning uncle and a cruel aunt took her in. Don't speak of it. Put it behind you. Move on, they told her. The messages she received in America forced her to again keep silent and hide in full view. She spent the next five decades struggling to put the pieces of her life back together and to fully understand the past she was too young to remember. A Life Rebuilt: The Remarkable Transformation of a War Orphan chronicles an odyssey that spans sixty years, three countries, and thousands of miles. Remarkably, at age sixty-two, Sylvia developed a relationship with a young man, forty years her junior, and against all odds she moved to Germany to live with him. Here she began to share the story of her family's fate with German students, senior citizens, and even neo-Nazi groups. By doing so, Sylvia reconciled with the people she had feared and loathed, and resurrected the lives of the parents she cannot remember, and cannot forget. Heartbreaking and ultimately inspiring, this memoir of loss, love, resilience, belonging, identity, and authenticity has a surprising resolution, told in an intimate voice with candor, substance, and heart.

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9781944037956

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Reviews

Sylvia's story is one of loss, survival, resilience, transcendence and, ultimately inspiration. Today more than ever, it is vitally important that stories like hers be told. --Hope Edelman, New York Times bestselling author of Motherless Daughters

This is one of the most heart-wrenching and ultimately uplifting Holocaust narratives.... While the personal events and the hard won insights of A Life Rebuilt are enough to draw readers to this book and it's amazingly resilient author, it is Sylvia's voice that is extraordinarily compelling. Hear it and you will be moved, enlightened and changed. --Philip Jason, Florida Weekly, Jewish Book World, Southern Literary Review This is an achingly beautiful account...An insightful effort to bring some clarity to an incomprehensible wartime catastrophe --Kirkus Review Emotionally satisfying without becoming sentimental, A Life Rebuilt is a memoir that works to come to terms with a complicated past. --Clarion Review In this heartfelt memoir, Sylvia Ruth Gutmann confronts her losses as a hidden child of the Holocaust...Rather than offering an in-depth account of the Holocaust, Gutmann's memoir focuses more on how one recovers from personal trauma. Her story is easy to read and highly relatable for anyone who has suffered terrible shock when young. --BlueInk Review Propelled by the violence of war from her family in Nazi-Germany, to brief stays in a Catholic orphanage, a French interment camp and with relatives in Switzerland seven-year-old Sylvia Gutmann arrives in America. Separated from her two older sisters, taunted by teachers and cruelly treated by the aunt with whom she resides, Sylvia quickly learns that kindness is not a given. But her journey is only just beginning. This is a story of determination, resilience and a surprising resolution, told in an intimate voice with candor, substance and heart. --Mindy Lewis author of Life Inside A Memoir Sylvia's story is one of loss, survival, resilience, transcendence and, ultimately inspiration. Today more than ever, it is vitally important that stories like hers be told. --Hope Edelman, New York Times bestselling author of Motherless Daughters

Author Information

Sylvia Ruth Gutmann immigrated with her two older sisters to the United States in 1946, four years after the murder of her parents in Auschwitz. Sylvia is a former spokesperson on behalf of the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York City. Every year she shares her story at numerous Holocaust remembrance and Wounded Warrior ceremonies organized by the U.S. Military. She has also spoken extensively throughout Europe and was granted honorary German citizenship in 2002 for her peace activism. Sylvia currently lives in Massachusetts. In addition to having spent several years in Berlin, Germany, she has also lived in New York City, San Diego, Miami, Washington, DC, and Rhinebeck, New York. Over the years her friends learned to use a pencil when adding her home to their address book!!

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