Ghost Children explores the spiritual and emotional trauma suffered by child survivors of the Holocaust. Drawing on her own experiences as a child in the Warsaw Ghetto, Lillian Boraks-Nemetz travels back in time to witness the pain and suffering of Jewish children. She discovers that many of those who died in the pogroms and camps live on as ghosts, haunting the lives of survivors and asking that they, too, be allowed to live, albeit in memory. The child survivors themselves, she reveals, are often unable to escape their own bruised childhoods and continue to search in later life for ways to heal and to redeem what was lost. In present-day Europe, Boraks-Nemetz visits the remains of concentration camps, ghettoes and shtelts, finding more ghosts of the past, ghosts that live in the black granite memorials of the Warsaw Ghetto, in the stones of Treblinka, in the trees of Auschwitz and in her grandparents' Polish garden. Ultimately, she points to a place of healing, at a light that burns within the very act of surviving and remembering. In spite of all that has happened, in spite of the admonition that, after Auschwitz, poetry is impossible, Boraks-Nemetz affirms that we must continue the journey.

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz was born in Warsaw, Poland, and is a child survivor of the Holocaust. She escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto and spent the remainder of the war in hiding under a false identity. Boraks-Nemetz graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature. She is an author of an award winning novel The Old Brown Suitcase followed by The Sunflower Diary and the Lenski File, as well as two volumes of poetry Ghost Children and Garden of Steel. She has translated Polish Emigre poetry into English and has also co-compiled the YA anthology of Canadian Holocaust writing, Tapestry of Hope. From 1980-2016, Boraks-Nemetz worked at the University of British Columbia’s Writing Center. She often speaks to students about the consequences of racism, as a member of the Holocaust Center’s Outreach Program. She is a board member of the Janusz Korczak Association of Canada. She lives and works in Vancouver.

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