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A gripping story of love, escape, and survival, from wartime Poland to a wedding in Connecticut
In the summer of 1942, the Jewish Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi killing squad terrorizing their Polish hometown. They fled to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest where they miraculously survived for two years. Of the 800 Jews from their town who hid in the forest, barely 200 survived, just a tiny number of them children. Liberated in 1944 by the Russian Army, they crossed the Alps on foot illegally as refugees, settling in Italy in DP camps for almost three years before finally immigrating to the United States.
One of the (many) remarkable twists of fate in this family's story is how during the first ghetto massacre Miriam Rabinowitz saved a young boy named Philip Lazowski by pretending he was her son. Many years later, a chance encounter at a Brooklyn wedding would lead Philip—now a student at Yeshiva University—to find the woman who saved him. After visiting the Rabinowitzes in Hartford, Connecticut he began courting Miriam’s daughter Ruth (who was also at the ghetto selection that day). Over the course of two Catskills summers, the two fell in love—and are still married today, 65 years later.
Based on years of research, and Frankel’s extensive interviews with members of the family, as well as other survivors, Into the Forest is that rarest of Holocaust stories with a happy ending and a powerful testament to the human spirit.
In the summer of 1942, the Jewish Rabinowitz family narrowly escaped the Nazi killing squad terrorizing their Polish hometown. They fled to the forbidding Bialowieza Forest where they miraculously survived for two years. Of the 800 Jews from their town who hid in the forest, barely 200 survived, just a tiny number of them children. Liberated in 1944 by the Russian Army, they crossed the Alps on foot illegally as refugees, settling in Italy in DP camps for almost three years before finally immigrating to the United States.
One of the (many) remarkable twists of fate in this family's story is how during the first ghetto massacre Miriam Rabinowitz saved a young boy named Philip Lazowski by pretending he was her son. Many years later, a chance encounter at a Brooklyn wedding would lead Philip—now a student at Yeshiva University—to find the woman who saved him. After visiting the Rabinowitzes in Hartford, Connecticut he began courting Miriam’s daughter Ruth (who was also at the ghetto selection that day). Over the course of two Catskills summers, the two fell in love—and are still married today, 65 years later.
Based on years of research, and Frankel’s extensive interviews with members of the family, as well as other survivors, Into the Forest is that rarest of Holocaust stories with a happy ending and a powerful testament to the human spirit.