Journeys with My Mother

A baby is born in Warsaw in 1939. Stalin has signed a pact of nonaggression with Hitler, marking the beginnings of the Second World War. As the city is attacked, Ola, a young nurse, escapes with her husband-to-be and their newborn baby to a small town in Soviet territory just across the border. Two years later, when the German forces attack the Soviets, she is separated from her partner and again has to flee. With immense courage and resourcefulness, Ola keeps herself alive, along with her baby Halina and the twenty injured soldiers she has to care for. For years following the deaths of her parents, Halina Rubin avoided looking inside two dusty boxes filled with letters, papers, photographs and notebooks. Finally, spurred on by her young daughter Annette, Halina unpacked these boxes and began discovering the details of her family’s traumatic history. Through reading old papers and travelling to those long-forgotten places, Journeys with my Mother was born – a remarkably intimate memoir that would otherwise have been lost forever. The narrative asks: what determines our behaviour in extreme situations? Here is a woman who, in the direst of circumstances, adhered to her moral code and never abandoned those who depended on her. Most Holocaust narratives detail stories of immense suffering and loss; this book tells the story of active opposition to the Nazi oppressors.