Frayed Lives

Book excerpt: The only artifact from my family's world before the onset of World War II is a pair of "raveled, stained, scored, and torn" napkins. These frayed "white napkins with blue borders" were "given to my mother by her mother on the platform of a train station in 1939." My parents traveled from that platform in Nowy Dwor Mazowiecki, Poland, to Bialystok to Siberia to Uzbekistan, saving their lives and losing everything else. Sally and Morris Michlewitz grew up in the newly independent Poland during the interwar period. They experienced the building of a newly defined nation. They witnessed the destruction and conquest of that nation in September 1939. Sally survived the Blitz in Warsaw. Morris, as a Polish infantryman, survived the failed defense of the city. During the next decade, they saw the world falling apart in small and large ways. The narrative ends in Brooklyn, New York in 1975. Frayed Lives paints the panorama of a family record which stretches across thousands of miles. It retells family history and connects it to the stories of other people surviving those times and places. It frames these stories with the history of record presented by scholars. It carefully depicts the desperation of refugees of war.