The Garden of Shadows

This is the true story of an adolescent girl who grows up in a small town in south-eastern Poland during the 1930s, where she finds herself in 1939, when Nazi Germany launches an attack on Poland and the country falls prey to the invaders. She remains there living in different places and with different people, until 1948, when she emigrates from Poland. Many events unfold around her and in her narrative she portrays the reality of that day-to-day struggle to elude death and awareness that it is always there, just around the corner. And yet the book casts a positive and finally optimistic view on humanity - there is always someone compassionate willing to risk his or her life to save the young woman. That is why, paradoxically, those harrowing circumstances do not destroy her psychologically but provide a glimpse into the multitude of human responses. She is being perpetually saved, as though by some unexplainable prompting of destiny. The purpose of writing this story is to portray how a young, naive adolescent is affected by and endures the impact of this very unusual and dramatic period in history, assuming that a picture of one individual's ordeal may have a stronger impact on a reader than the recounting of similar tribulations undergone by masses.