Country of Ash ─ A Jewish Doctor in Poland, 1939-1945

?Dr. Reicher’s memoir tells a gripping, tragic, unforgettable tale that, like Wladyslaw Szpilman’s The Pianist, recounts the horrors of being a Jew in Poland during World War II. This important historical document distinguishes itself from other Holocaust narratives in many ways, but perhaps in none more so than this: its perseverant hero not only saved his wife and daughter but helped bring one of the most notorious Nazis of all to justice.” ?AUSTIN RATNER, Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature-winning author of The Jump Artist and In the Land of the Living

Country of Ash is the starkly compelling, original chronicle of a Jewish doctor who miraculously survived near-certain death, first inside the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes, where he was forced to treat the Gestapo, then on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he hid under numerous disguises. He clandestinely recorded the terrible events he witnessed, but his manuscript disappeared during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, reunited with his wife and young daughter, he rewrote his story.

Peopled with historical figures like the controversial Chaim Rumkowski, who fancied himself a king of the Jews, to infamous Nazi commanders and dozens of Jews and non-Jews who played cat and mouse with death throughout the war, Reicher’s memoir is about a community faced with extinction and the chance decisions and strokes of luck that kept a few stunned souls alive.

Edward Reicher (1900?1975) was born in Lodz, Poland. He graduated with a degree in medicine from the University of Warsaw, later studied dermatology in Paris and Vienna, and practiced in Lodz as a dermatologist and venereal disease specialist both before and after World War II. A Jewish survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, Reicher appeared at a tribunal in Salzburg to identify Hermann Hofle and give an eyewitness account of Hofle’s role in Operation Reinhard, which sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths in the Polish concentration camps.

Country of Ash, first published posthumously in France, was translated from the French by Magda Bogin and includes a foreword by Edward Reicher’s daughter Elisabeth Bizouard-Reicher.

Edward Reicher (1900?1975) was born in Lodz, Poland. He graduated with a degree in medicine from the University of Warsaw, later studied dermatology in Paris and Vienna, and practiced in Lodz as a dermatologist and venereal disease specialist both before and after World War II. A Jewish survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, Reicher appeared at a tribunal in Salzburg to identify Hermann Hofle and give an eyewitness account of Hofle’s role in Operation Reinhard, which sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths in the Polish concentration camps. Reicher’s memoir, Country of Ash, was rewritten from memory in Polish after being destroyed in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and first published posthumously in France, in a French translation by his daughter Elisabeth Reicher-Bizouard and Jacques Greif.

Translator Magda Bogin is acclaimed for her ?suave” (Publishers Weekly) and ?strikingly true” (School Library Journal) translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Isabel Allende’s international bestseller The House of Spirits, and letters by children deported to Auschwitz, which appear in the landmark publication French Children of the Holocaust. Bogin’s own novel, Natalya, God’s Messenger, received the Harold U. Ribalow Prize. She lives in New York.