A WOLF IN THE ATTIC: The Legacy of a Hidden Child of the Holocaust

"Stay away from that door!" the author's mother used to warn. "Don't look there, don't go near it; there's a mean, hungry wolf in there, and if you open the door he'll get out and eat you up." It's Richman first memory, and it comes from the years during WWII when she and her Jewish mother masqueraded as Christians in a small Polish town. But there was no wolf, Richman understands later, what lay hidden behind the door was her father, who had escaped from the Janowska concentration camp and whose discovery would have unmasked the family. Even at three years of age, she writes, "I understood the importance of keeping the secret of my father's existence." Richman and her parents immigrate to New York after the war, and the rest of this well-intentioned but uninspired memoir details her childhood and schooling, her relationships with men, her failed marriage, her eventual career as a psychoanalyst and her long marriage to Spyros Orfanos, a noted psychoanalyst himself. Written in clear but pedestrian prose, Richman's account details the myriad ways her early experiences of trauma shaped her later years. The ongoing themes of denial and her growing ability to identity herself as a survivor—reading the diary of Anne Frank or seeing Stalag 17 give her glimpses into her experience—drive the narrative; it is only after years of analysis that she understands a connection between the "difficulty in expressing myself verbally and the early injunctions against speaking the truth." As in analysis, Richman methodically goes through her life and offers theories of who she is and how she became that way. While many Holocaust memoirs focus primarily on the events of the Shoah, this volume examines the lingering effects it had on children. (Apr.)