Let's Ask Betka

LET’S ASK BETKA is the page-turning story of an arduous journey of endurance tempered by luck, love, respect, and humor. Itpresents a series of events with roller-coasting emotions and anirresistible sweep of human feelings. The story unravels through the eyes of a Warsaw Ghetto survivor.Her journey, as this book appears in print, has taken ninety-six years.She remembers everyone and everything as vividly as any of us remember today’s newspaper headlines. Her memory takes her fromthe sound of the Nazi boots pounding on cobblestone streets to thestomping feet at her granddaughter’s wedding. From the scent of herfather’s cologne, mixed with tobacco, to the stench of urine and sweatin a claustrophobic cattle car. From concerts andice cream to nightmares that still haunt. Fromthe comfort of her mother’s arms to the sting ofa whip igniting every nerve in her body.  Her journey takes her through forced workcamps and deposits her in the arms of a cherished and devoted husband. She was a bystanderto cruelty and a witness to insanity. But hersense of humor and intelligence enabled her, notmerely to survivein a world far less innocentthan she once thought, but to triumphin it.
Betka’s story, moreover, has had the good fortune to be told through her son Jacob’s brilliant recreation of it. Scenes achieve a vividness and clarity, and are evoked with such conciseness and narrativedexterity, that they sweep readers along and leave them breathless.His compelling sense of love and admiration for his parents makes fora deeply poignant read that is not easily forgotten. A graduate of Hofstra University, he taught for twenty-five years and spent twenty-fiveyears in sales in the garment industry. During that time, he married,had two children and is now blessed with two grandchildren.