FROM ASHES TO LIFE

A most eloquent Holocaust memoir, distinguished by symmetry of storyline and theme. Eichengreen spins out several narrative threads that braid neatly in the end, beginning with the story of how an American uncle, despite the Nazi threat, refused to sponsor the emigration of her family to the States: Years later, the author confronts this man, as well others who compounded her suffering. Before the war, though, Eichengreen's Hamburg-based, Polish-born family met tragedy head on, culminating in 1941 in her father's return home from Dachau in a cigar box—a clump of ashes briskly delivered by the Gestapo. Soon after, Eichengreen, her mother, and her sister are deported to Poland's Lodz Ghetto, where the author watches her mother swell up and die: ``...the skinny, ragged wagoner was seen day after day picking up the ghetto dead....On July 1, 1942, he stopped at our door.'' The siblings try to obtain a grave, only to be told by the cemetery keeper, ``Today no one buries the dead.'' But they persevere and, 50 years later, Eichengreen has an approximate grave site at which to mourn. The memoir's past-future patterning continues as a woman in Lodz asks Eichengreen to one day look up her son in New York; eventually, Eichengreen not only manages to chance upon the man but to marry him. Another accidental postwar meeting involves the author's cruel female kapo at Auschwitz: Like other Germans and Poles the author confronts, the former kapo protests, ``I didn't do anything wrong.'' And in yet another mirroring, though Eichengreen can't bring herself to shoot a Nazi oppressor when a British officer gives her the opportunity, she later has the satisfaction of using courtroom testimony to put away a score of war criminals. Meanwhile, postwar letters from an older, married ghetto lover, as well as from the son of a Nazi whom Eichengreen indicted, keep the narration returning to Eichengreen's remarkable past. A skillful, dramatic, unsentimental blend of introspection and action.