cover image The Alchemy of Survival: One Woman's Journey

The Alchemy of Survival: One Woman's Journey

John E. Mack. Addison Wesley Publishing Company, $19 (238pp) ISBN 978-0-201-12682-2

How Rogers, a victim of the Holocaust of World War II, survived the experience and built a fruitful professional and personal life is explored here. Mack, a psychiatrist at the Harvard Medical School and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of T. E. Lawrence, narrates events in the life of his coauthor, a Romanian-born child psychiatrist at UCLA. Rogers, a Jew, was a teenager when she and her family were imprisoned in a Nazi internment camp. Her ingenuity in gaining work as a foundry laborer was to spare the lives of her family and provide the springboard for escape. Rogers became a medical student in Prague, endured years of poverty and statelessness until she emigrated to the United States in 1953. Hers is a heartening success story grounded in the legacy of the near destruction of Eastern European Jewry. Photos not seen by PW. (June)