Reviews:

My father grew up in Zhagere. Born in 1893, he left the town in 1911 after a huge fire destroyed his few belongings. Over the years I asked my father about the town. He told me very little. Apparently, he had lived through an impoverished and bitter childhood. Recently, 20 years after his death, I have begun researching his town and, if possible, his family. I have found very little information about the town and nothing at all about his family. Rose Zwi's book helps bring home the kind of life the Jews lived there. I identify with her and her family because she is about my age and the political views of some of her relatives were the same as my father's. I expended great affort to put myself in the place of the Jews who lived and were killed there. Some of them might have been relatives. Yet, all of the Jews murdered there are in a sense my relatives. They and I come from the same stock and faced the world with same point of view. When Ms Zwi talks about the streets and buildings there, I imagine my father or other family members walking in and about the town going through the daily acts of living. I was especially interested in the fact that horses played a big part in life there, even after the advent of the automobile. My father served an apprenticeship to a harness maker and brought his trade with him to the U.S. He tried to contact relatives and friends after the war, but he found that everyone had been killed. I wonder what he would have though about this book.

Noyma Appelbaum
5 Feb 1999

LWINP is an excellent book and moved me very much. I admire the skilful way you've organised - and doggedly searched out - your material, much of it so harrowing that lesser hands would have lost control. You have the real writer's ability, at crucial points, to find the exact word and phrase... Your publishers, Spinifex, have done a first-rate production job, as to design, lay-out, cover, paper, binding etc.

Reviewed by Morris Kahn
London music publisher
5 October 1998

... I was intensely moved by your writing, which brought the Holocaust too close for comfort, and I became depressed and pessimistic about man's brutal nature and the existence already of other Holocausts. I wonder where you found the courage and strength to embark on such a journey You have all my admiration....

Mona Jaspan
8 April 1998
Toronto, Canada

I fully believe that your LWINP is one of the best books I have read. I more than congratulate you on this achievement. I had a strange feeling that I was writing it with you, and that you did the absolutely right thing every time. At times my feeling of identification was so strong that I had palpitations! And of course I could hear your voice, and particularly when you were writing about parts of your childhood I could hear your laugh, very genuine and with this consciousness of bittere gelechter. It is a truly adult book or as adult as a book can possibly be in this amazingly cockeyed world. I can well believe that it took you years to write, it is so very well proportioned and I like the way you never give way to self-indulgence. I hope and believe that you'll get a lot of very positive acclaim. What a pity that the "Unmenschen" that should learn from it are incapable of learning from it....

Orah Reeb
Israel
2 April 1998

... let me express my hightest regard for the fact that within such a short time you managed to master the heap of material of the story of such a crully torn apart and wide dispersed family. And not only that you mastered it, but you had the courage to show uncompromisingly the vulnerability of the material at your disposition. What I especially admire is that you make the reader part of the steps of your discoveries as well as of your setbacks... It is not an easy book to read. So often your language is treahcerously sinmple, and so the high degree of information with which it is loaded, sometimes can be overlook. But this means that the book is accessible to a variety of people. Those who don't know much about the disturbing history of the Jews will learn a lot about it ... with the specific story of your family embedded in the history of the Lithuanians, while the other who are more familiar with the overall history, will be enabled to participate in the specific story of your family, relating it to the wider context of the history of the Jews...There is not one truth... That's why your book is like the famous film Rashomon. Not to have the pretention to tell THE story, the most honest and lively approach which I hold in the highest esteem...What I admire about your style is that it is really apparent that you come from a background of story-tellers... despite the upsetting sadness of the picture of the human race... it stays a pleasure to read because you really take the reader with you into the rooms... the landscapes you are passing through... the moods you are undergoing. And your language seems to follow so effortlessly your empathic feeling as well as your sharp observations, your historical excursions, your pleasure in the beauty of landscapes covered by so much sweetness and dimmed by pictures of horror....

Inge Tramm
Amsterdam
l January 1998

It gives me so much pleasure to tell you how I enjoyed LWINP. Setting aside the sad and grisly nub of the contents, the book reflects a highlight in your life to me - so much of you at your best shines out of it. It is as if all the writing technique you have acquired is being used to deal with the material. The use of the present tense when you are experiencing contact with your living family, the way you divided the chapter, and the book, the use of excellent vocabulary, the clarity of your research references, the overall need and search for justice, that to me is a hallmark of everything you do! And maybe the heavy burden of the Holocaust that you have carried is now somewhat assuaged, hopefully, although possibly that can never happen. You state often your humble personal aim in writing this history of what happened to six people, and because you do this, with conscientiousness, thoroughness, clarity, you make it relevant to everyone. Maybe it is only this kind of honest book that can reach many people. The personal is just as valid and important as the wide world view today - intellectualism serves a small often cutoff minority, in my opinion. Your songs, your Jewish warmth and concern, passion, love of family, all have their place helping to make the other details bearable. And for me personally you give information about Popilan (my father) and Ponevez (my mother) that I would never have known...

Rochie Silbert
London
29 October 1997

I have just finished reading LWINP and had to ring Spinifex Press to thank them for publishing it - and they suggested I write to you ... Your book moved me more than I can say, and it must have been traumatic for you to write it. I am the child of East European Jews... Thank you for the wonderful Yiddish songs and stories - we spoke Yiddish at home and it's good to see it in print... Rose, your book deserves the widest possible readership ...

Frances Milat
Potts Point Sydney
6 October 97

... I thought it was remarkable, moving, absorbing, and I am delighted we are to be associated with it...

Pat Tucker
Wits. University Press
9 May 1997

...Your wonderful book LWINP which I have just read, evoked such strong emotions in me that I felt I had to write to you ... It is not often that one hears of the lesser-known towns of Eastern Europe in detail. Your book has succeeded in placing Zhager firmly on the Jewish map of Latvia-Lithuania as a flourishing Jewish community in its time. Thank you for capturing the times so honestly and so poignantly in your beautiful writing style, and thank you for all the painstaking research which you undertook...

Tessa Budow
Constantia, Cape Town
15 February 1997

This is very belated thank you on behalf of the Jewish Museum for the book reading which you gave us...... Your evocative writing recreated a town, its inhabitants, their life, and the aftermath of the destuction and your passion in recording it all. It ia personal memorial which adds its own colour to the fibre of the history of this sad century.... I look forward to reading your other books.

Gaby Eisen
Jewish Museum Melbourne
24 November 1994

I was twenty four when I first watched The Diary of Anne Frank on television. I immediately purchased a copy of the book. Her story saddened me. I felt such anger. Soon after, Ronald Reagan's visits to the death camps at Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen were televised and all that fear and anger resurfaced. I had nightmares where I dreamt that I was imprisoned in a death camp and gassed along with the other prisoners, our bodies dumped in piles in fields nearby. Somehow I manage to survive and lay surrounded by the dead, too weak to escape and fearing discovery. I wake up screaming.

Last Walk in Naryshkin Park affected me in much the same way. No matter how many books on the holocaust are published each time I read another one, new atrocities reveal themselves and old ones become magnified.

On the morning of Yom Kippur, October 2nd, 1941 Einsatzkommando men accompanied by Lithuanian partisans ordered 3000 Jewish men, women and children living in the Zhager ghetto to march to Naryshkin Park where they were massacred as they stood in rows, awaiting what they thought was transportation to another ghetto. Among those killed in Zhager were Rose Zwi's paternal grandmother, her aunts and uncles and their respective families.

Rose's father, Gershon Yoffe who had survived the holocaust by emigrating first to Mexico in 1927 and then to South Africa in 1930 was consumed by guilt that he was not able to save them. Rose states that 'The Holocaust dominated my childhood and adolescence, suppurating like a neglected wound'. In an effort to appease 'unquiet spirits' Rose Zwi takes us on her journey into her past. Through her research of both primary and secondary documentation, together with personal testimonies, memories and nightmares of survivors she pieces together their lives and their untimely death during the Nazi occupation.

Her journey takes her from Australia to Jerusalem, New York and Lithuania and along the way we glimpse through other eyes what it meant to face betrayal, torture and possible extinction. The survivors accounts of their struggles to escape, and the death of children and loved ones who did not survive are narrated with candour and simplicity. Their nightmares are recounted in such a matter-of-fact manner that the reality of the meanings behind their words shock and horrify. Events are narrated over and over again through different voices and are reinforced in the minds of the reader.

In this way perhaps one will not forget what happened. If no-one forgets the holocaust and its horrors then perhaps they will not be repeated in the future. If people are reminded that ordinary Lithuanian men and women, not just Nazi soldiers were responsible for raping torturing and murdering Jewish Lithuanians during the Second World War then perhaps people will realise that we are all capable of such atrocities towards other human beings unless checked. As Rose Zwi says 'Remembering may not be enough, but to forget is unconscionable'.

Reviewed by Raffaela Santilli