Looking for Strangers by Dori Katz 940.53 Kat

 

I have read many books about WWII and the Holocaust but this one was a bit different.  Dori Katz was three years old when her mother left her with strangers - a Catholic family with whom she would live until D-Day.  Then she was placed in an orphanage until her mother was finally able to claim her.  Her father had been taken away and she only had a few vague memories of him.  Dori and her mother immigrated to the United States.  She heard stories from her mother over the years.  Her father's fate was never known (death, of course, but not where or when).  In the early 1980's Dori is a university professor.  One day she makes the decision to buy a ticket for a noon movie in Manhattan.  It was entitled As If It Were Yesterday.  It was a documentary about the hidden children during the war.  There on the screen was her life - at least bits and pieces of what she remembered.  Thus begins a quest to return to Belgium and to try and find out about the family who hid her and maybe about her father's last days.  The book moves back and forth between the war years and Dori's trip to Europe.